New government funding totaling £42 million ($58.5 million) has been released today to the newly founded Faraday Institution to support further battery storage research.

The monies are part of a wider £246 million Industrial Strategy intended to boost the U.K.’s battery know-how and scale-up capabilities. Four U.K.-based consortia will receive funding to support their application-inspired research aimed specifically at overcoming current challenges in acceleration of the electric vehicle (EV) industry.

The Faraday Institution is an independent national battery research institute that will utilize government funding to help establish Britain’s fledgling battery storage industry. From education and training to R&D and commercialization, the aim of the scheme is to place the U.K. at the forefront of global battery technological excellence.

Initial focus is to be on EVs and developing bespoke batteries that can expedite the growth of this sector as part of the U.K.’s decarbonization drive. “With 200,000 EVs set to be on U.K. roads by the end of 2018, and worldwide sales growing by 45% in 2016, investment in car batteries is a massive opportunity for Britain and one that is estimated to be worth £5 billion by 2025,” said Business Minister, Richard Harrington.

The minister added that government investment through the Faraday Institution will help to deliver the necessary research to allow the U.K. to seize economic and commercial opportunities in battery technology.

The four projects that will receive the funding were settled upon following consultation between the Faraday Institution and industry, so as to ensure that the needs of the commercial sector will be met. In addition to the government-backed funding, a further £44.6 million is expected from industrial partners to help support the research.

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The automakers’ efforts share several common concerns. They are looking to extend the life of batteries that are no longer useful in an electric vehicle but have enough juice left to store power for a household or provide residential backup power. They are working toward energy systems that allow for a more sustainable energy ecosystem for electric vehicles. And, by increasing the market for batteries, they hope to improve the economies of scale of battery manufacturing and drive down costs.

Audi, for instance, said its recent announcement will help it move closer to providing “emission-free premium mobility.” That could also be a strong selling point among customers looking to purchase an electric vehicle as an EV is only as green as the network that provides the power to charge it.

Overall, most auto makers’ participation in the stationary storage market takes the form of pilot projects. There are exceptions, such as Tesla, which has a separate energy storage division, but most auto makers are trying to find ways to generate more revenue through electric vehicles, or make those revenue streams available to their customers, Chris Robinson, an energy storage analyst at Lux Research, told Utility Dive. In most of the pilot projects, the manufacturers “are trying to find a way to make EVs more affordable,” he said.

Recent announcements by Audi and Nissan follow earlier plans unveiled by Tesla, BMW and Mercedes Benz. Tesla, in April 2015, became the first auto maker to enter the energy storage market with the introduction of its Powerwall system. Last May, Tesla said it would combine Powerwall installations with its commercial scale Powerpack batteries as a way of aggregating storage capability and make it more useful for balancing the grid.

In June 2016, BMW said it was entering the market for home storage by making its i3 high lithium-ion batteries available to households. The car maker said it could potentially expand the program to include its re-purposed 2nd Life Batteries, as they become available in the market. The systems can be used to store power from a rooftop solar system or they can be used as a source of backup energy for a home charging station for electric vehicles.

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France-headquartered multinational utility ENGIE has followed up acquisitions in smart energy by incorporating three companies, including commercial energy storage provider Green Charge, into its parent brand with the explicit aim of furthering its position in North American markets.

The three, all headquartered in the US, are: Green Charge (also sometimes known as Green Charge Networks), a Washington-based energy data analytics and optimisation company, Ecova, and Opterra Energy Services, which installs energy efficient solutions for customers, including solar panels and LED lighting.  

ENGIE said the rebranding of the three “is designed to amplify ENGIE’s voice in the North American market” and raise the visibility of the parent company in each of the acquired subsidiaries’ fields. It appears the utility is happy with its profile in the utility-scale and distributed generation sectors, but wants to “build an even more comprehensive portfolio of energy offerings in North America”. In a 2016 corporate blog, ENGIE said that all three acquisitions had been “strategic transactions aimed at delivering broader value to energy consumers”.

Green Charge will now be known as ENGIE Storage Services NA, continuing to be headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company was recently identified by research firm IHS Markit as one of three leaders in commercial and industrial (C&I) energy storage in the US, with a value proposition based around lowering business clients’ energy costs through peak shaving – managing the expensive demand charges levied onto commercial electric ratepayers that can constitute as much as 50% of a company’s power bills. Green Charge also accrues further revenues through provision of grid services, particularly in helping reduce the network’s peak load. ENGIE took an 80% majority stake in the company two years ago.

As with the other two leaders in the US C&I space, Advanced Microgrid Solutions and Stem Inc, I.H.S Markit analyst Julian Jansen said that critical to their success so far has been the offering of energy storage “as-a-service” – in basic terms, creating long or medium-term agreements with customers to save them money through something akin to a subscription model, as opposed to selling equipment outright to customers to operate the assets themselves. Green Charge has executed dozens of projects on this basis, mainly in California, although the company is also the supplier of 13MWh of aggregated small-scale systems for a project in Brooklyn-Queens, used to mitigate peak demand in the New York neighbourhoods for utility ConEdison. 

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In December 2016, Panasonic and Tesla finalized an agreement to begin manufacturing solar PV cells and modules at the “Gigafactory 2” in Buffalo, New York.

Under the arrangement, Panasonic agreed to cover the capital costs associated with the factory and Tesla agreed to purchase Panasonic’s custom-manufactured solar products.

“These high-efficiency PV cells and modules will be used to produce solar panels in the non-solar roof products,” according to Tesla’s statement. “When production of the solar roof begins, Tesla will also incorporate Panasonic’s cells into the many kinds of solar glass tile roofs that Tesla will be manufacturing.”

Production of Tesla’s Solar Roof product did not begin for months after the initial announcement. But one year later — following delays and a brief trial run — Panasonic reports that cell manufacturing for the solar roof is now officially underway.

“Panasonic is already inside that factory making solar panels. That started in October of last year,” said Peter Fannon, vice president of technology policy at Panasonic Corporation of North America, in an interview at CES. “Also, we are just now beginning to manufacture cells.”

The Japanese multinational made an initial $260 million investment in the Buffalo facility, where it makes HIT (heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer) solar cells for Tesla. With the plant now up and running, Panasonic is prepared to invest more.

“We expect that investment, along with Tesla, as it grows, will grow with it,” Fannon said.

But it’s unclear how much growing is going on. 

Tesla completed the first solar roof installations on the homes of executives and employees in August. Little was heard about the solar roof after that, save for reports of several more installations for employees. The tiles were initially produced at small scale at the former SolarCity pilot production line in Fremont, California.

Last summer, Tesla CTO JB Straubel said solar roof production at Gigafactory 2 would ramp up “in a substantial way” by the end of 2017, and increased the company’s goal to achieve 2 gigawatts of solar panel capacity per year. But as the new year arrived, the status of Tesla’s solar tile production was still murky.

Tesla confirmed today, however, that solar roof manufacturing began in Buffalo in December. The company also said that it is now starting Solar Roof Textured and Smooth installations for non-employee homeowners.

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Energy storage’s unique operating characteristics — it can be load or supply — have made market participation a complicated problem. But California now has interim rules designed to address some of the difficulties and to ensure storage resources are providing all the services they can while also being properly valued. 

In the order, the CPUC acknowledged that current market rules, including utility standard contracts and program tariffs, fail to support the ability of an energy resource to access more than one service. Known as “stacking,” it would include incremental values to the wholesale market, distribution grid, transmission system, resource adequacy requirements and customers.

“As a result, energy storage cannot realize its full economic value to the electricity system even though it may be capable of providing multiple benefits and services,” according to the CPUC order.

The order adopted 11 interim rules, which state that “resources interconnected in the customer domain may provide services in any domain.” Resources interconnected in the distribution domain may provide services in all domains except the customer domain, with the possible exception of community storage resources.

“Resources interconnected in the transmission domain may provide services in all domains except the customer or distribution domains,” the rules continued. Resources interconnected “in any grid domain may provide
resource adequacy, transmission and wholesale market services.”

A report from Brattle Group last year identified regulatory barriers that needed to be addressed to realize the full potential of value stacking. The report, titled Stacked Benefits: Comprehensively Valuing Battery Storage in California, was prepared for Eos Energy Storage with funding from the California Energy Commission.

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On islanded (or isolated) grids with growing renewable penetrations, grid operators often struggle to maintain system stability. Operators in places as diverse as Ireland, Puerto Rico and Australia frequently rely on inertial response from thermal power plants like coal or gas-fired generators to balance sudden mismatches between supply and demand.

However, recent research from Northern Ireland’s Queens University Belfast (QUB) finds that battery-based energy storage can provide inertial response for system reliability much more efficiently, at a lower cost and with substantially reduced emissions than a much larger quantity of thermal generation.

QUB’s research found that just 360MW of battery-based energy storage could provide the equivalent stabilisation to Ireland’s All-Island electricity system as would normally be provided by 3GW of conventional thermal generation. That shift to batteries could save up to €19 million (~£16.9 million) annually and could achieve approximately 1.4 million tonnes of annual CO2 savings.

Inertia: A blink-of-the-eye grid balancing service

Inertia is a system-wide service that responds to fluctuations in electricity frequency in the first fraction of a second of an imbalance between supply and demand – for example, when a power station suddenly drops offline. Traditionally, this stabilising hand has come from the kinetic energy provided by the spinning mass of (synchronous) generators that produce electricity from fossil fuels.

All this occurs well within the first half a second of an issue – literally, the time it takes a human eye to blink. Traditionally the electric power sector has not thought of it as service. It’s just part of the physics of synchronous generators; and we don’t miss something until it’s gone.

As the proportion of energy from (non-synchronous) wind and solar grows this source of traditional ‘analogue’ inertia is in increasingly short supply. The typical solution to this has been to hold back wind and solar output during such times, but this is growing increasingly costly as renewable penetration grows. Let’s face facts: paying not to use zero-fuel cost and zero carbon renewables isn’t a tenable solution in the long run; and would require a significant overbuild of renewable capacity to achieve the same decarbonisation targets.

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Spanish banking giant Santander has announced this week it will invest £28.5 million into London-based Battery Energy Storage Solutions for the express purpose of building and operating a grid-scale battery storage portfolio of 100 megawatts by the end of the year.

Battery Energy Storage Solutions (BESS), a London-based independent provider of power storage, energy security, and energy flexibility services, owns and operates five operational sites in the UK and boasts a large pipeline of projects for imminent delivery. The company was only formed in March of 2017 by leading energy storage executive experts, and as of the end of 2017 the company owned and operated 14 megawatts (MW) worth of grid-scale battery storage projects, and had a further 49 MW worth of grid-connected batteries to be connected by the end of this month.

Santander UK, the UK subsidiary of Spanish banking giant Santander Bank, N. A., announced last week that it was committing £28.5 million to BESS in an effort to support the company’s plans to become one of the UK’s largest independent owner-operators of battery storage assets and to meet their short-term strategy of building and operating a portfolio of 100 MW worth of grid-scale battery storage assets by the end of 2018.

The timing of Santander’s investment — and that of the creation of BESS itself — stems from efforts to capitalize on the booming energy efficiency and energy storage industries across the UK. Battery storage technologies are also obviously tailor-made to partner with renewable energy technologies, which have similarly exploded in the UK over the last few years, and in 2017 the country broke 13 separate records, including the first 24-hour period without coal-generated power, the first time that wind, nuclear, and solar produced more than coal and gas, and the “greenest summer” with 52% of electricity generated from low-carbon sources.

“The UK’s power system is now the fourth cleanest in Europe,” said Nicholas Beatty, co-founder of Battery Energy Storage Solutions. “However, the pace of transition to a low carbon power system brings with it challenges for the National Grid in balancing the network and ensuring supply and demand is matched on a second by second basis. Such balancing of supply and demand only being possible by the introduction of new technologies like battery storage. We believe our company is uniquely placed to capture that market demand. We value the guidance and support provided by the Santander deal team in this complex transaction.”

“We are delighted to have closed this landmark transaction with a new client in a new niche market segment: project finance for battery storage,” said Howard Whitehead, Head of Infrastructure & Renewable Energy, Santander Corporate & Commercial. “We believe we are one of the first senior debt lenders to close a project finance transaction in this space, a fact which underscores Santander’s desire to be a leader in this fast developing sector.”

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Significant seasonal demand spikes affect a number of areas around the country. Addressing them in a cost effective manner is a priority for those utilities that face large differentials between summer and winter loads.

One of those places, Nantucket, is both an isolated island and a wealthy summer colony whose population swells in the warmest months. It is a growing load area served by National Grid, and to meet that new demand, an expensive new transmission line could be required in the future. With the island’s backup generation aging, it leaves residents and the tourism industry in a precarious spot, should anything go wrong.

In an increasingly prevalent move, the island is turning to energy storage for a solution that illustrates how scalable battery systems can be. But while National Grid plans to avoid a costly transmission upgrade, its storage-based solution won’t be in place until 2019, leaving Nantucket’s residents and businesses vulnerable to potential outages as demand rises this summer.

In some respects, Massachusetts’ Nantucket Island is similar to North Carolina’s Ocracoke — highly seasonal, powered by undersea transmission cables, with some backup generation in place.

Ocracoke lessons

Last summer, Ocracoke Island experienced a week-long partial outage when one of those undersea cables was cut. Tourists had to evacuate and island businesses lost a significant chunk of their seasonal revenues. A microgrid developed on the island managed to keep some power on for residents, but unfortunately its diesel backup generation failed as well.

Nantucket is looking to avoid a similar disaster, and has employed a larger, yet similar approach to resiliency. Each island is looking to diesel backup and energy storage from Tesla, along with demand management, to ensure they can meet summer peak demand.

Ocracoke Island has about 1,000 full-time residents, and so its system is much smaller, including a 3 MW diesel generator, 500 kW/1 MWh Tesla battery and 15 kW of solar.

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Trade associations NY BEST and the Energy Storage Association have been quick to applaud New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s historic setting of a 1,500MW energy storage procurement target for his state.

Energy-Storage.News reported earlier this week that Cuomo, in his annual State of the State address, had set out plans for US$200 million to be invested via New York’s NY Green Bank and US$65 million via NYSERDA in the development and deployment of energy storage projects, while the 1,500MW target should be reached by 2025.

The announcement was made along with a raft of other environmental, energy and sustainability policy measures as Cuomo attempted to set out a “comprehensive agenda to combat climate change”.

These included establishments of energy efficiency targets, moves to cap greenhouse gas emissions and limit pollution from natural gas plants, establish a solar PV programme for 10,000 low-income households and to reconvene a scientific panel on climate change disbanded by the Trump presidential administration.

Energy Storage Association CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman said her group “heartily applauded” the establishment of the target. Meanwhile William Acker at NY BEST, pitched as a regional trade association as well as a technology development group – NY BEST has its own battery testing and research facilities available to its members – said the deployment of 1,500MW by 2025 and the US$265 million investment would help cement New York’s position as a leader in the energy storage industry while contributing strongly to the state’s climate change and sustainability goals.

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