Stem, Inc., an energy storage optimization company, was chosen by Kilroy Realty Corporation (KRC) to deploy over 7.5 MWh of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven energy storage at eight commercial buildings in KRC’s California portfolio. The selection was facilitated by Black Bear Energy Inc., who acted as the owner’s representative for Kilroy Realty.

Stem will install its Athena^TM-powered storage in 2018 at four KRC office buildings in San Francisco and another four in Los Angeles, representing approximately 20% of KRC’s stabilized office portfolio. The KRC systems, which utilize a uniquely-tailored financial structure for real estate firms, will join the world’s largest digitally-connected storage network. This network uses the systems when idle to support strained local grids and enable higher penetrations of clean power in the community.

“Intelligent energy storage helps reduce the environmental footprint of our building operations,” said Sara Neff, senior vice president of sustainability at KRC. “Black Bear’s expertise with clean energy and Stem’s AI-powered solution will help us achieve our environmental goals while helping to modernize the grid, which is a natural alignment with our business vision.”

“When it comes to real estate and energy storage for commercial buildings, it’s the brains behind the batteries that differentiate solutions,” said John Carrington, CEO of Stem.

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New York State could be on its way to crafting the most aggressive energy storage goal in the country.

The target is still a work in progress, but based on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) recent announcement and interviews with analysts, it could be set above 1,500 MW by 2030.

“I think the target would be higher than 1,500 MW,” Conor Bambrick, air and energy director at Environmental Advocates of New York, told Utility Dive.

California’s energy storage target is 1,300 MW by 2020. In his state of the state address in early January, Cuomo set a target of 1,500 MW by 2025. But 2030 is the target year that will be established by New York’s current energy storage bill, to keep it on the same track as the state’s 50% renewables goal in its Clean Energy Standard.

‘Eye catching’ goal

Cuomo’s 1,500 MW goal is “eye catching,” Dan Finn-Foley, senior storage analyst at GTM Research, told Utility Dive. But “at most,” he said, “it will serve as one input for the Public Service Commission as they begin the process of designing and setting policy around the final target.”

Finn-Foley called the 1,500 MW goal “aspirational,” but noted that “it comes with serious teeth” in the form of $200 million from the New York Green Bank and $60 million from NYSERDA towards energy storage pilots and deployments. “This level of investment has real potential to kick-start the market, though the timing is still up in the air,” Finn-Foley said.

The timing of New York’s energy storage target has been a stop and go affair from the start. The state’s legislature passed a pair of bills last June that directed the New York Public Service Commission to develop an Energy Storage Deployment Program, including a storage procurement target for 2030. The program would be run by the New York Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA). Cuomo signed the bill nearly six months later, but with a catch — a “chapter amendment,” which is sometimes used when a bill is passed without executive input.

In a signing memo attached to the bill, Cuomo said his office had “secured an agreement with the Legislature to pass legislation in the upcoming session” that would amend the law. That means the storage legislation will not reach its final form until it is amended by the passage of A8921, which has been introduced and is working its way through the legislative process. The bill is expected to pass soon, according to the office of Representative Amy Paulin (D), one of the bill’s sponsors.

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It’s safe to say battery storage has come to Hawaii after Honolulu County experienced a record-shattering year in issuing permits for solar+storage permits for homeowners and businesses alike.

According to a report by the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT), the state capital issued 731 permits for solar+storage projects which, given the county’s population of nearly 908,000 may not seem like much – until you realize the permitting office provided a total of 40 permits in 2016.

While the number of permits issued started off slowly, a sharp spike started in May once the city and county streamlined the application and approval process.

The data also shows that homeowners who installed PV+batteries at the same time – as opposed to installing them separately or adding batteries to an existing system – saved more than $7,700.

Only seven of the permits were issued to commercial PV installations, indicating a potential growth market for solar installers in a state where residential solar penetration may be close to reaching saturation.

The sharp rise in permits issued for solar+storage comes as the state legislature is trying – again – to pass a bill (SB 2016) for energy storage installations. Introduced in early January,  the bill, introduced Tuesday, would allow Hawaiian residents to claim an income tax credit in the year they installed the system on the following schedule:

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Digital industrial company GE and flexible energy storage systems operator Arenko Group have entered into a strategic alliance to build grid-scale energy storage systemsin the UK.

The companies will seek to leverage the advantages of combining GE‘s battery technology solutions, power electronics and advanced controls with Arenko’s leadership in operating batteries in the UK market and its proprietary energy trading software platform.

GE Power global commercial and marketing executive Mirko Mollnari stated that energy storage would help balance supply and demand close to real time, avoiding frequency drifts and supporting the mid-term response to grid imbalances.

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Startup Gravitricity, which has just received a £650,000 grant from Innovate UK, plans to use abandoned shafts to house massive weights. When energy is plentiful, the weights will be winched towards the surface, in much the same way that water is driven uphill in pumped hydro storage. However, unlike pumped hydro, the system should be able to respond to fluctuations in demand almost instantly.

“As we rely more and more on renewable energy, there is an increasing need to find ways to store that energy – so we can produce quick bursts of power exactly when it is needed,” said Gravitricity managing director Charlie Blair.

“So far there is a lot of focus on batteries, but our idea is quite different. Gravitricity uses a heavy weight – up to 2000 tonnes – suspended in a deep shaft by cables attached to winches. When there is excess electricity, for example on a windy day, the weight is winched to the top of the shaft ready to generate power.”

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Tesla has been making big moves on the energy storage market in Australia, but they are now all being dwarfed by this new project that will see them install solar arrays and Powerwalls on 50,000 homes to create the biggest virtual power plant in the world.

The company’s main project has been the 100MW/ 129MWh Powerpack project in South Australia, the largest in the world for now.

But now instead of being a large centralized battery system using Tesla’s Powerpacks, the new project announced today is using Tesla’s residential battery system, the Powerwall, to create decentralized energy storage, which basically results in creating a massive virtual power plant.

South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill announced the deal today – the biggest of its kind by far.

The 50,000 homes in the state will be fitted with 5 kW solar arrays and 13.5 kWh Tesla Powerwall 2 battery systems.

It will result in at least 650 MWh of energy storage capacity distributed in the state.

Tesla said in a statement:

“When the South Australian Government invited submissions for innovation in renewables and storage, Tesla’s proposal to create a virtual power plant with 250 megawatts of solar energy and 650 megawatt hours of battery storage was successful. A virtual power plant utilises Tesla Powerwall batteries to store energy collectively from thousands of homes with solar panels. At key moments, the virtual power plant could provide as much capacity as a large gas turbine or coal power plant.”

It will function much like Tesla’s giant Powerpack system, which charges when demand and electricity rates are low and discharges when demand and prices are high.

We reported last month the single battery system managed to make around $1 million in just a few days.

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Tesla is partnering with South Australia’s Labor government to create the world’s largest virtual power plant, consisting of 50,000 homes fitted with solar panels and the company’s Powerwall 2 home battery unit. The $800 million project will have roughly six times more energy storage capacity than Tesla’s massive Powerpack farm at the Hornsdale wind farm near Jamestown.

Initial plans for the virtual grid would begin with low-income, social housing properties, with each house being equipped with a 5 kW rooftop solar system and a 13.5 kWh Tesla Powerwall 2 home battery system. In total, the project is expected to deliver 250 MW of solar energy and 650 MWh of battery storage capacity when complete, while providing grid stability by shifting demand away from a stressed grid during peak hours.

State premier Jay Weatherill expressed his excitement about the virtual power plant that would not only complement Tesla’s big battery project at the Hornsdale wind farm; it would dwarf the 100MW/129MWh Powerpack system many times over as well.

“My government has already delivered the world’s biggest battery, and now we will deliver the world’s largest virtual power plant. We will use people’s homes as a way to generate energy for the South Australian grid, with participating households benefiting with significant savings in their energy bills. Our energy plan means that we are leading the world in renewable energy and now we are making it easier for more homes to become self-sufficient,” he said, according to a RenewEnergy report.

To fund the creation of the world’s largest virtual power plant, the State Government is assisting the release of a $2 million grant and $30 million loan from the Renewable Technology Fund to get the project underway, as noted in the project’s official website. The SA government is also seeking additional funding from private investors. Tesla would be responsible for the installation of the solar systems and Powerwall 2 home battery packs.

Smart Energy Council CEO John Grimes lauded Tesla and the South Australian government for the initiative. Grimes, for one, noted that the construction of the virtual power plant would place the country at the forefront of the green revolution in technology.

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Carbon-free energy: Is the answer blowing in the wind? Perhaps, but the wind doesn’t always blow, nor does the sun always shine. The energy generated by wind and solar power is intermittent, meaning that the generated electricity goes up and down according to the weather.

But the output from the electricity grid must be controllable to match the second-by-second changing demand from consumers. So the intermittency of wind and solar power is an operational challenge for the electricity system.

Energy storage is a widely acknowledged solution to the problem of intermittent renewables. The idea is that storage charges up when the wind is blowing, or the sun is shining, then discharges later when the energy is needed. Storage for the grid can be a chemical battery like those we use in electronic devices, but it can also take the form of pumping water up a hill to a reservoir and generating electricity when letting it flow back down, or storing and discharging compressed air in an underground cavern.

Motivated by a view that storage is a “green” technology, governments are increasingly promoting utility-scale and distributed energy storage. For example, in November 2017, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill mandating targets for storage adoption by 2030. Other states with similar policies are Oregon, Massachusetts, California and Maryland. Companies like Tesla also have been branding storage systems as clean technologies.

But do large storage systems lower emissions in our current grids? In a recent study, we found this isn’t necessarily the case – a reflection of how complex the electricity system can be.

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The first large-scale commercial plant was built in Huntorf in Germany and has now been in successful operation for many years.

The reason for the slow progress of CAES is the prohibitive cost of a suitable storage vessel. Large CAES schemes have relied on disused underground caverns to provide a reservoir for the compressed air, but these are not readily available and may not be close to a market for electrical energy.

Also, existing CAES plants are not environmentally “green”. Compression of air into the storage reservoir generally relies on compressor power generated by fossil fuel, and recovery of stored energy uses conventional gas turbines burning fossil fuel.

Even if the compressor power is provided by wind turbines, the plant is predominately fossil fuel-powered.

Fresh opportunities

The prospects for CAES could be about to change. Buoyant supports for offshore wind turbines are of increasing interest.

Floating foundations such as the Statoil Hywind type require a substantial buoyancy volume for hydrodynamic stability and this offers an obvious opportunity for storing energy as compressed air.

Figure 1 (below) shows the dimensions of an articulated buoyant column sized for a 6MW turbine in 80m water depth.

Figure 2 (beneath) shows the buoyant column diameters required to achieve sufficient stability for turbines mounted on such columns as a function of turbine power and water depth.

Figure 3 (bottom) shows the total energy that could be theoretically stored in these columns when filled with compressed air at 10 bar.

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