New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill Nov. 29 to create a statewide energystoragetarget, more than five months after it unanimously passed the legislature.

Depending on how it’s executed, the target could reduce regulatory barriers to storage development and spur adoption of this technology, which stands to help New York’s effort to increase clean energy and efficient grid usage.

“It really creates an important market,” said William Acker, executive director of the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium. “It lets industry know that New York State is serious about opening and creating a market for energy storage in the state.”

The law calls on the Public Service Commission to investigate and set a target for 2030. The original text called for a determination of the target by January 1, 2018, but that timeline is expected to be pushed back to allow more deliberation. 

Once set, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the Long Island Power Authority will run a deployment program to meet the goal. The program must consider both customer-sited and front-of-the-meter storage, evaluating its use for transmission upgrade deferral and peak load reduction in constrained areas.

NYSERDA has been working on a storage roadmap study that will form the analytical basis for the target.

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Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil’s Batwind project in Scotland, combining wind turbines with energy storage, will have a battery system installed by system integrator Younicos.

Batwind is under development through a partnership between Statoil and Masdar, the renewables and energy efficiency company owned by a government investment group in the United Arab Emirates’ Abu Dhabi. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by parties including Statoil and the Scottish government to develop the project in March 2016.

The project also hosts the world’s first floating wind turbines, based on Statoil’s proprietary Hywind platform, with the wind farm portion of the project dubbed Hywind Scotland. The floating turbines generate 30MW of electricity and began production in mid-October, when the facility was officially opened by Scotland’s First Minister Nichola Sturgeon.

The offshore power plant, some 25km off the coast of Aberdeenshire to the east of the Scottish coast, is 75% owned by Statoil and 25% by Masdar. Statoil announced yesterday that it has awarded Younicos the contract to deliver a battery energy storage system of 1MW / 1.3MWh to connect to Hywind Scotland.

The battery is intended to maximise the output of the wind farm usable by the grid, which in times of overproduction could mean storing the energy generated for injection into the grid later, could smooth out the variable generation of the six 5MW Siemens Gamesa-supplied turbines and otherwise mitigate peaks and troughs in energy production. Younicos has in the past sourced batteries from Samsung SDI and others, acting as integrator for grid-scale and commercial energy storage projects, using its own energy and battery management software and control platforms.

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Tesla built the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery ahead of schedule. It’s an important milestone for the technology, and Tesla itself. 

But is it coming at a cost to smaller players in the industry?

This week on The Interchange, we’ll talk about how Tesla’s battery supply constraints are hitting downstream installers and developers. We’ll bring GTM Staff Writer Julian Spector on the show to discuss his recent reporting on Tesla’s delivery delays.

Then, we’ll cover some of Spector’s other big stories this year: howstorageis suddenly challenging natural gas peaker plants around the world; and why New York is struggling to put a cohesive energy storage framework in place. (Note: This podcast was recorded on Monday. On Thursday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the state’s energy storage target into law.)

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Hawaiian Electric on Thursday said it started installing a flywheel energy storage system at its Campbell Industrial Park generating station in West Oahu to test the device’s capabilities.

The flywheel system, created by California-based Amber Kinetics, is expected to be in operation at the beginning of next year. The 8-kilowatt, 32-kilowatt-hour system will be capable of charging and discharging electricity for multiple duty cycles per day with no loss of capacity over a 20-year-plus service life, according to a joint statement.

“Energy storage is essential to reach our 100‐percent renewable energy goals by taking advantage of Hawaii’s abundant but variable solar and wind energy,” Colton Ching, Hawaiian Electric senior vice president for planning and technology, said in a statement. “We are very enthusiastic to work with Amber Kinetics to evaluate this very promising flywheel energy storage system.”

The pilot project is jointly funded by Hawaiian Electric and Elemental Excelerator. The Honolulu-based startup accelerator selected Amber Kinetics to its portfolio in 2013.

According to the statement, Amber Kinetics managed to created the world’s first commercially available four-hour flywheel system. Its technology extends the duration and efficiency of flywheels from minutes to hours.

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Developer Convergent Energy & Power has installed a commercial and industrial (C&I) energy storage system in Ontario for an injection-moulded plastics company, sized with 8.5MWh of batteries.

In common with C&I projects elsewhere, the system is designed to help the host, Husky Injection Molding Systems, reduce its electricity bills by reducing the number of times in a year Husky’s operations need to draw electricity from the grid at peak times. Convergent said it is expected to reduce electricity costs on the load the system is connected to by 15% to 30% each year, beginning in early 2018.

Ontario also has what are known as Global Adjustment charges, levied on the majority of electricity bill-payers, to help pay for ensuring there is adequate generation capacity on the network to meet demand and to pay for renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation measures.

Global Adjustment charges are set monthly, reflecting the difference between wholesale electricity prices and what it costs to keep nuclear and hydroelectric plants running, to build and maintain energy infrastructure, to pay for power fed into the grid and the cost of conservation programmes.

Essentially, while the methodology varies for different classes of customer, the amount of power drawn from the grid will affect how liable for these charges each customer is. For large industrial users of power, the contribution of their peaks in demand to Ontario’s overall demand peaks determines how much they pay. While in the US, demand charges for C&I customers can comprise 50% of their bill, in Ontario, Global Adjustment charges can account for as much as 70%.

Convergent Energy + Power has delivered the project, based on a Lockheed Martin Gridstar Lithium battery system – the aerospace and engineering firm spoke with Energy-Storage.News of having a “long-term interest” in the market as it launched its turnkey energy storage product range in 2016 – which Convergent said it selected due to its compact, robust and reliable design. Local firm S&T Electric is supplying balance of plant equipment, while Montreal-headquartered engineering company SNC Lavalin designed the whole system.

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A detail in Lazard’s latest levelized cost ofstorage(LCOS) report has highlighted a little-known but potentially major issue for the lithium-ion battery industry.  

The financial advisory and asset management firm downgraded its estimates for lithium-ion round-trip efficiency to account for parasitic losses, GTM has discovered.

“As more battery systems are deployed, estimates of actual round-trip efficiencies are lower, and installation costs are higher than expected and than reported in last year’s LCOS 2.0,” according to the Lazard study.

“Consequently, estimates for total ‘Commercial’ use case LCOS rose slightly, despite [a] lower equipment cost estimate,” it states.

Lazard’s two previous LCOS studies had simply used the round-trip efficiency of the battery and power electronics since there was little reliable data on the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) requirements of the system, Lazard said.  

Experience is beginning to show this parasitic load could be significant. By its LCOS 3.0 study, said Lazard, some published reports and estimates were providing a range of 80 percent to 90 percent round-trip efficiency for entire systems, including the cooling load. 

Figures for parasitic loss in lithium-ion battery systems remain notoriously hard to find. “It’s almost impossible to find detailed information on this subject,” said Hugh Sharman, principal at the energy consultancy Incoteco.

HVAC energy consumption levels will also vary between projects as different regions and usage levels require different cooling loads, Lazard noted.

One study of three battery systems in 2014, by experts from EA Technology and Northern Powergrid, hinted that electrical energy storage (EES) losses might be significantly higher than those used by Lazard in its calculations.

“The round-trip efficiencies for the EES systems have been calculated as between 83 percent and 86 percent, falling to between 41 percent and 69 percent where parasitic loads are included,” concluded the study.

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By 31 December, a half-dozen 1-megawatt lithium-ion batteries could be in place, helping to support Puerto Rico’s electric power grid, which was almost entirely destroyed by Hurricane Maria.

Independent power producer AES is working with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) to site and deploy the batteries. Most likely, says Chris Shelton, chief technology officer of the Virginia-based company, the batteries—which AES is donating—will support the still-fragile grid by enhancing both power quality and grid stability.

“We are not looking for commercial applications,” Shelton says. “We are focused on putting them to work to help.”

Storage batteries are gaining credibility as a reliable and rapidly deployable technology. A pair of crises thousands of miles apart illustrates how the technology can bolster grids when they face difficult challenges.

California Crisis

The first crisis struck in October 2015 when the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility in southern California began leaking. The accident shut the facility for months and threatened gas supplies to electric power generating facilities providing 10,000 megawatts of capacity to the region. Also at risk were dozens of industrial facilities and public buildings like schools and hospitals.

State regulators in May 2016 approved deployment of more than 100 MW of battery-based energy storage systems. Among the systems was the 20-MW/80 megawatt-hour (MWh) Mira Loma Battery Storage Facility, installed by Tesla in less than three months.

And at a utility substation in Escondido, Calif., a 30-MW, four-hour-duration lithium-ion Advancion battery array was installed by AES Energy Storage. At the time, it was one of the world’s largest such deployments.

The Aliso Canyon response showed that developers could design, build, and commission significant amounts of energy storage in a short amount of time. Installing an equal amount of natural gas-fired generation likely would have required years rather than months.

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Lithium and cobalt are key components of lithium-ion batteries, and are receiving a huge amount of attention as demand for these batteries continues to grow.

Graphite is another key material required for lithium-ion batteries, but it has not gotten as much attention this year. To learn more about its role in these batteries and about the future of energy storage technology, the Investing News Network spoke with Dr. Ryan Bayliss, a senior research fellow in the Department of Materials and a fellow of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

In the interview below, Bayliss, who is also interim chief of staff of the Faraday Institution, the UK’s new electrochemical energy storage institute, also discusses nickel’s role in lithium-ion batteries, as well as electric vehicle (EV) adoption in Europe. Bayliss spoke to the Investing News Network via phone.

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The scientists outline a simple strategy to improve catalytic activity to reduce activation barriers of electrochemical reactions by tuning interfacial electronic coupling between the adsorbate and catalyst surface.

“The electrocatalytic processes usually involve the adsorption of reactants on the surfaces of catalysts, break some reactant bonds to form new chemical bonds between the catalyst and reactants, and result in activated intermediates. Because the catalytic activity is attributed to the interfacial electronic coupling, adsorption energy is a good descriptor to identify catalytic activity for surface reactions.”

Based on the free energy change of electrochemical reaction, the authors divided the whole electrochemical reaction into an intrinsic reaction part and a catalytic effect part. “The catalytic effect is directly reflected in the adsorption energy differences of reactants and products,” they stated. Adsorption energy as a catalytic descriptor in those typical reactions is discussed in on-electron pair reactions, evolution reactions and reduction reactions to present the effect of electronic coupling between catalysts and charged species on catalytic activity.

“The relationship between adsorption energy and catalytic activity is helpful for the initial selection of catalysts and the key of mapping the relationship is to establish the quantitative relationship between the intrinsic electronic properties of materials and catalytic descriptors,” they write. Structural and elementary descriptors such as d-band center, tolerance factor and eg electron number are explained in d-band framework to related to adsorption energy. “Furthermore, because structural and elementary descriptors are experimentally quantified compared with adsorption energy, structural and elementary descriptors are useful to discover new catalyst materials and ensure a leap forward in electrochemical performance.”

“Charge transfer is also an important part in electrochemical reactions and improve the catalytic activity. The principle of charge transfer is to remove charge from stable bonds in reactants and lower the activation barrier of the rate-limiting step,” they added.

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An energy transition is underway. Solar and wind are being added in ever-greater numbers. Electric vehicles are becoming more commonplace. Meanwhile, policy makers are grappling with the right mix of policies to pay for it all.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s conference on the future of energy in Asia assembled industry executives, policy makers and bankers tackle some of the big questions surrounding energy.

“The past tells us a very clear lesson, and that is that we have underestimated the pace of the energy transition,” BNEF analyst Kobad Bhavnagri said as the conference started in Shanghai.

Here are some of the highlights from Tuesday’s presentations:

EVs are here to stay

Electronic vehicles have become a key element of the energy transition.

BNEF expects 530 million EVs on the road by 2040. Moreover, the researcher expects more electric buses and trucks as that segment of the transportation market becomes more attractive for electrification.

The implications for oil are significant, with the researcher expecting EVs to displace 8 million barrels of daily oil demand by 2040. Meanwhile, China is not only interested in EVs for the domestic market. The world’s most-populous nation is aiming to become a globally competitive automaker by the 2020s — with the latest EV technology.

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