Aggreko-owned storage system experts Younicos claimed first place in the pv magazine Energy Storage Highlights award. Alexander Schönfeldt, the company’s VP sales EMEA, describes this award-winning concept and reveals more details about Younicos’ new rental storage system.

For the Energy Storage Europe Exhibition and Conference held in Düsseldorf, Germany in mid-March, pv magazineteamed up with Messe Düsseldorf to produce a 32-page storage special issue that led with a prestigious Energy Storage Highlights Award.

Among the many entrants, the winning storage innovation – as identified via the scoring aggregation from our independent jury – was a combined gas and battery grid services power plant by Berlin-based storage experts Younicos.

The idea of the plant is, as Schönfeldt says, to give aged gas plants a second life via the support of battery storage. “It enables plant owners to respond to requirements in the market with the battery, and for the gas engine to respond in the capacity market with secondary reserve.”

At the Energy Storage Europe Exhibition, Younicos was also showcasing its new rental storage-as-a-service model, which Schönfeldt described as an innovative way to “unlock the storage market in a way that customer’s do not have to worry about investment hurdles or technology risk.”

After Tesla’s massive plan to create a 50,000-home virtual power plant with Powerwalls being in jeopardy in Australia, another similar project is now been announced for a new ‘virtual power plant’.

New Premier of South Australia, Steven Marshall, a member of the Liberal party who just replaced the Labor party, threw some cold water on the project, which is so far still going forward with the first 1,100 installations, but it could face some red tapes for the other 49,000 installations.

But now the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has today announced $7.7 million in funding for Simply Energy to build a second virtual power plant across Adelaide.

Like for Tesla’s own virtual power plant, Simply Energy confirmed that it plans to use Tesla’s Powerwall 2.

They described the project in a press release today:

“The $23 million project will deliver Tesla Powerwall 2 home batteries to up to 1200 Adelaide households representing 6 MW of residential energy storage. A further 2 MW of demand response capacity will be deployed across 10 commercial businesses.”

The goal is to have it up and running by the end of 2019.

It’s on a much smaller scale than the previous project, but ARENA is treating like a pilot project.

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said about this project:

“We think consumer energy resources have a huge role to play in Australia’s energy future, but we are still figuring out how we can orchestrate rooftop solar and home batteries to feed back into the grid. This is technically hard to do, which is why these pilot projects are so important,” he said. “This is a potential model for how distributed energy resources can be operated at large scale in the future to help reduce energy prices,”

The project has the goal to lower the energy bill of families with the batteries while also stabilizing the grid by reducing peak power demand with the large energy storage capacity.

The energy industry is evolving towards more ‘enterprise platform’-based business models, enabling energy storage to play a vital role for businesses and the grid, NEC Energy Solutions (NEC ES) CEO Steve Fludder has said.

NEC ES, the NEC Corporation’s energy storage system integration and technology business, relies increasingly on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Fludder said in an interview and presentation at last month’s Energy Storage Summit in London. Fludder took over as CEO in November, replacing temporary boss Hiro Ezawa, who in turn replaced longstanding leader Budd Collins.

These IT capabilities not only give NEC ES and its partners better visibility into system operation, Fludder said, but they also enable the company and others like it to capture value across the whole marketplace, making an analogy with the way that online retail giant Amazon uses predictive analytics to stock its strategically-located warehouses with the goods returning customers are most likely to purchase.

“This concept is actually happening around us all the time. You have cars that can tell you when they need to go in to be serviced, for example. I’m quite interested in the Amazon analogy, because that’s something that touches everyone every day. How do they do that? If they did that by building up massive amounts of inventory of everything that’s on sale on their site, they would never make money,” Fludder told Energy-Storage.News.

Energy storage’s unique ability to act as both generation and load makes it a round peg in the square peg board of utility regulation.

That mismatch is destined to come into sharper relief as a rulemaking on energy storage in Texas moves forward, highlighting some of the contentious issues the technology raises in competitive power markets.

At the wholesale level, there is no problem installing an energy storage project in Texas. The state is already home to a number of storage projects, including the 2 MW Elbow Creek project deployed by NRG Energy and Toshiba in Howard County and the nearly 20 MW Texas Waves project near Roscoe that E.On brought online earlier this year.

But deploying storage on the distribution grid can be challenging, as AEP Texas and Oncor Electric have discovered, and that can limit energy storage’s potential revenue streams. “There can be some wholesale market rules that make it harder to capture the full value,” Johannes Pfeifenberger, a principal at The Brattle Group, told Utility Dive.

The issue goes to the heart of the structure of Texas’ power market and what has enabled it to work so well, Michael Jewell, an attorney with Jewell & Associates, told Utility Dive. “The separation of competitive and regulated entities has been very strict and thorough in Texas. It is a framework that everyone jealously guards.”

Electricite de France said today that it plans to invest a whopping $9.93 billion in electricity storage by 2035.

“Electricity-storage technologies have a potential to radically change the energy sector,” said Chief Executive Jean-Bernard Levy.

The French utility company said on Tuesday that the planned investment would be used to develop an estimated 10 gigawatts of additional energy storage projects, or roughly twice the total amount of capacity it currently operates.

The utility said it would target energy storage projects in the European market, especially in France, but that it would also pursue opportunities in Africa, including battery storage and storage plus solar projects in Ghana and the Ivory Coast.

Over the next two years, EDF said it would use roughly one third of its investment in energy storage to acquiring projects and start-up companies focused on energy storage projects and grid applications. A portion of the investment – about $87 million – will also be used to support research and development activities in the energy storage space.

EDF owns a large fleet of nuclear reactors in France, which derives about 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. France has 58 nuclear reactors operated by EDF, with a total capacity of 63.1 gigawatts.