According to a report published by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers(IME) on May 9, gas grids have the potential to store excess renewable power in the form of hydrogen for longer than batteries can.

In 2017, rising renewable energy capacity in the UK caused wind power generation to jump by 31 percent while solar generation rose by 11 percent, according to recent analysis by Carbon Brief. As more electricity is produced by renewables, which only generate power under specific conditions such as when the sun is shining or wind is blowing, energy storage has become vital to the task of matching supply to demand.

As more electricity is produced by renewables… energy storage has become vital to the task of matching supply to demand

Lithium-ion batteries are the typical solution to questions of energy storage, but concerns have been raised about the limited availability of sustainable cobalt, a key component in the manufacture of batteries. But the IME has proposed a new solution entirely: hydrogen.

“We need to move away from our wasteful culture to a more sustainable and circular economy,” said Jenifer Baxter, Head of Engineering at the IME and lead author of the report. “Power-to-gas and hydrogen technology could and should play a major role in building this future.”

In the report, Energy from Gas: Taking a Whole System Approach, the UK-based group called for the government to support power-to-gas technology, which allows excess electricity on the National Grid to be used to create hydrogen through electrolysis.

This process produces ‘green’ gas that can be used anywhere from producing low emissions fuel for transport to reducing carbon dioxide emissions from heating systems, as well as balancing the electricity gird.

“The UK has a strong track record of being at the cutting edge of new energy developments, and this could present the country with a chance to be a world leader in power-to-gas and hydrogen technology,” Baxter said.

Although the new method sounds promising, its benefits could still be a long way off. The IME has called on the government to support its plan by providing funding and changing the UK’s pipes to support the use of up to 20 percent hydrogen in the gas distribution network by 2023.

Sanjeev Gupta, chairman of the GFG Alliance and majority shareholder of SIMEC ZEN Energy , talked about the state of energy storage in Australia, ahead of the Australian Energy Storage Conference and Exhibition (AES 2018) where he will be the keynote speaker.

In the last year, Gupta’s company acquired Arrium steelworks, invested in upgrading Whyalla Steelworks in South Australia, won a contract to supply at least 80 per cent of the South Australian Government’s energy needs until 2020, and purchased a majority stake in ZEN Energy through his father’s energy company, the SIMEC Group. He also announced plans to build the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery in South Australia, and most recently partnered with Neoen to deliver solar power to Victoria’s Laverton Steelworks.

Transition to renewable

Gupta said he believes in the transition of energy consumption to renewable solutions and is a big supporter of this, but with intermittency a key challenge, having alternative solutions for energy is important.

“There are various ways of doing that, and we’re working on many of those. Like different types of storage actually, if you want to call it that. So pumped hydro is one big part of that initiative, using empty mine pits which we own, and there’s obviously plenty of those in Australia. Using them as reservoirs for energy and running them to generate power during times of high electricity [demand], or no electricity through other means like solar, is one way.

“Then there are other ways, using waste and biomass is another big way, which we’re doing in the UK, which we’ll bring to Australia eventually. In between that, there are batteries, because batteries are not competitive as a storage medium today, but they will be in our view, in the long term. The same way as solar prices and wind prices came down, battery prices will come down as well.”

“As we think about storage at the ISO, really what we’re thinking about is how do we make sure that storage can participate as fully as possible as an asset, as a resource,” Michael DeSocio, senior manager of market design at the New York Independent System Operator said Tuesday at the Independent Power Producers of New York Spring Conference in Albany.

“We see storage as vital for the grid of the future and if you think about the stresses and strains the future grid will have, it will be an asset I think any grid operator would love to have,” he said.

The growth in intermittent renewable energy has created an important role for storage resources that can either store energy during low demand periods like windy evenings to be discharged during the day, or help smooth the transitions between high and low renewable energy production periods.

And as the use case for storage has become clear and more equipment is built, the costs are rapidly declining, which many see as a catalyst for wider deployment. Lithium-ion battery energy storage costs were $1,000/kWh in 2010 and have come down to less than $200/kWh today and are expected to be less than $100/kWh by the mid 2020’s, Jason Doling, energy storage program manager at the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority, said. Those costs are for battery packs, which account for 20% to 30% of the total installed cost of a battery energy storage system. “When we start to hit $400/kWh installed cost, really fascinating things happen because the number of use cases that economically” make sense significantly increases, Doling said.

These include distribution system relief, customer-sited storage for load relief or demand response, pairing with existing generation to operate plants more efficiently and pairing with renewables. Doling estimates that this point will be reached in the next three to five years and research indicates that around 2,000 MW could be deployed by 2025 in New York. The state has a goal of reaching 1,500 MW by that date.

For the first time, the Calstart Annual Symposium will share a venue with ESNA 2018, providing an opportunity for developers, utility executives, energy users, fleet managers, auto manufacturers and suppliers, policy makers and other stakeholders to learn, network and exchange ideas. The joint conference will be the largest showcase of grid energy storage technologies and applications in North America, and will highlight innovations in clean transportation technologies, policy and infrastructure.

For three days, the Pasadena Convention Center plaza will become a showroom for the newest advanced technology vehicles that are eligible under the California Air Resources Board’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP). Vehicle manufacturers will unveil their 2020 line of new low- and zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty buses and trucks.

“We’re proud to host this unique combined event that underscores the importance of energy storage across multiple industry segments,” said ESNA co-founder and Chair, Janice Lin. “Storage is not only a critical resource for grid resilience and the global transition to renewable energy, it also provides the foundation for clean transportation solutions.”

“Energy storage innovations are driving the evolution of the electric vehicle market,” said John Boesel, CALSTART president and CEO. “Given that dynamic, it’s logical to bring our annual symposium to ESNA 2018, where we will combine learnings and share strategies to build a globally competitive US clean transportation industry.”

Last week, CleanTechnica took note of some concerns that energy storage and renewables have enabled utilities to keep leveraging fossil fuels into the grid. Sure enough, here comes the US Department of Energy with a solution: a newly announced round of $30 million in funding for next-generation technology leading to batteries that can store electricity in bulk for at least 10 hours.

At that scale, energy storage can solve three problems at once: it can funnel more wind and solar into the grid, it can shrink reliance on coal baseload power plants, and it can push gas “peaker” plants out of the picture. Problem solved!

Why Exactly Is The Trump Administration Interested In Bulk Energy Storage?

By the way, 10 hours is just for starters. The new round of funding aims at systems that can shoot electricity into the grid for up to 100 hours, which puts nuclear power on even shakier ground than it is now (that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms).

The funding comes through the Energy Department’s ARPA-E (Advanced Projects Research Agency – Energy) office, which kickstarts high risk, high reward R&D. That means we taxpayers get the credit for pushing new clean tech into the market when private sector dollars lack the muscle. Group hug!

For those of you new to the ARPA-E topic, Congress breathed the office into life in 2007 during the last years of the Bush Administration, but it wasn’t funded until 2009 under the Obama Administration.

If you’re thinking that breaks down along political lines well, it does — up to a point. President* Trump threatened to kill ARPA-E and he appeared to be on track for successlast year, but Secretary of Energy Rick Perry seems to have gotten the last laugh.

Renewables are not ARPA-E’s only area of focus but they’re a big one, and that’s where the 10-to-100 goal for energy storage comes in.

If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. At least that is what the song says about New York City. And it stands for energy storage.

New York City has some of the most stringent rules in the country for permitting energy storage projects, as well as an ambitious storage target of 100 MWh by 2020. But there were only 4.8 MWh of storage installed in the city at the beginning of 2017, as it is so difficult to secure a permit for a project — especially involving lithium-ion technology.

At the end of April, New York took a step toward resolving that issue with the release of the first comprehensive guidelines for installing lithium-ion batteries in New York City.

The guidelines were the result of a collaboration among the City University of New York (CUNY) Smart Distributed Generation Hub, the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), the NYC Department of Buildings (DOB), Consolidated Edison and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The guidelines are only for outdoor energy storage projects, including rooftop projects, but they represent a step forward in a multi-year process.

“Not only will the guidelines bring in more developers, I think we’ll see more movement in pending projects,” Tria Case, director of sustainability and energy conservation at CUNY, told Utility Dive.

A template approach

The CUNY guide is a “huge help because people are very uncertain about the process,” Veronica Ciechowska Weiss, a project manager with Burnham Nationwide, told Utility Dive. Burnham helps clients through the permitting process for a variety of types of projects.

The state treats the permitting of energy storage projects on an individual basis, which has led to a costly and time-consuming process, according to Ciechowska Weiss. Solar projects in New York faced a similar problem before the state came up with permitting guidelines like the ones now being developed for energy storage, she said.

“The goal is to help storage move to scale” by developing a process that provides more of a template-approach to project permitting, CUNY’s Case said.

Serial entrepreneur Kevin Williams of Kansas City developed a new power storage product called Wise Power and has a crowdfunding campaign to help bring it to market.

Williams founded Kansas City-based cybersecurity company Wilco Technologies. It was providing workforce credential services to more than 1.5 million registered users throughout the U.S. Department of Defense by 2017, when he decided to sell it.

Williams used the money to help develop a revolutionary new power storage unit and controller system that uses Internet of Things technology to communicate with all the electronic devices in your home. Now he has prototypes built and seeks to raise $1.07 million to hone them in preparation for mass production. He has field testing scheduled in August and hopes to go to market by the fourth quarter.

The crowdfunding campaign was launched on a regulated site called StartEngine, which was founded by Howard Marks, a video game programmer famous for bringing “Guitar Hero” and “Call of Duty” to market.

“I received an email from Howard’s group, which had seen some information about Wise Power and what we were doing,” Williams said. “They said I should really consider using their platform to raise capital.”

Williams has two patents for his products, with a plan to disrupt a market estimated to be worth $11 billion.

The Wise Power crowdfunding campaign offers convertible notes, which allow the holder to convert them into company stock once Wise Power raises at least $3 million in qualified equity financing during its next equity round. There is a minimum investment of $100. All investors gain preferred customer status for a period of one year.

“One of the reasons we’re using StartEngine is so the masses can invest for as little as $100,” Williams said. “We want to use distributors so others can share in this as well. We designed this specifically to be shared with the masses.”

A group of researchers at Stanford University have developed a new type of battery using water and salt that they hope could be used to store energy produced from wind and solar farms, increasing the effectiveness of renewable energy sources.

The two fastest-growing forms of energy generation in the world today are wind and solar, and both have the same fundamental limitation. They’re subject to the weather, and routinely go for hours or days without generating any electricity at all. Energy companies relying on these generation methods need some sort of backup while their solar farms and wind turbines are offline.

There aren’t too many options for these energy companies, and most simply turn to fossil fuels like coal or natural gas which significantly undercuts the benefits of green energy in the first place. An alternate solution—and one being trialed in places like Australia—is battery storage, so that excess power produced from renewable energy can be saved for later.

But batteries have their own problems. Most utility-scale battery systems are expensive to build, and there’s a limit to how long they last. Typically, rechargeable batteries have a lifetime of around a decade before they can no longer effectively hold a charge and need to be replaced.

The new battery developed by researchers at Stanfordsolves these problems with a cheap, long-lasting battery perfect for utility-scale energy storage. The battery is a manganese-hydrogen battery, and it’s made by dissolving manganese sulfate, a common salt, in water.

When electricity is pumped through the solution, it triggers a chemical reaction, creating manganese dioxide and pure hydrogen gas. That hydrogen gas can then be stored and later burned as fuel whenever excess electricity is needed. The battery itself can be recharged with more electricity and the process repeats.