There might be a debate in the political world about the value of solar energy and energy storage for the grid, businesses, and homeowners. But there doesn’t seem to be any disagreement in the military over the value of solar energy, both in the field and at bases in the U.S. 

Solar and energy storage could increase security for thousands of troops across the country, and in the next decade the military could be a huge source of growth for the industry. 

Where solar and energy storage provides value

According to a recent piece by Joshua Pearce, a professor at Michigan Tech University who also receives research funding from the DOE and military, there are three types of threats to energy the military is worried about at domestic bases: natural disasters, crime or terrorism, and cyber threats. 

Since the military normally relies on the “civilian grid” for electricity, it’s susceptible to the same forces that have left millions of Americans without power over the last two months because of hurricanes. Attacks of some sort and cyber threats, which are a growing concern for grid operators, would be major concerns for the military by proxy. 

Renewable energy installations or microgrids on military bases could help answer some of that challenge. SunPower (NASDAQ:SPWR) has built solar projects at the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California, and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. It even added a 1-megawatt (MW) energy storage system at Redstone Arsenal earlier this year to reduce peak power demand at the base. First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) recently supplied 120 MW of solar modules to a military base installation in Florida. 

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There may be an unexpected beneficiary of a trade case that threatens to upend the $29 billion U.S. solar industry: energy storage.

With solar construction slowing in the aftermath of the April trade complaint filed by bankrupt manufacturer Suniva Inc., that’s giving some developers time to change or expand focus.

“The Suniva case actually makes us more excited about storage,” Wayne Chomitz, vice president of project finance at Panasonic Corp.-backed Coronal Energy, said Tuesday at Infocast’s Solar Connect conference in San Diego. “It gives us more time to focus on storage.”

Storage costs have fallen about 40 percent since 2014.

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Fresh from unveiling its latest LEAF model and new electricity grid and home storage offerings yesterday, Nissan has confirmed plans for three pilot projects next year aimed at expanding power grid and mobility access to developing world communities.

Each of the as yet unnamed projects will focus on providing access to energy and mobility in regions where energy and transport provision is unavailable or unreliable, the firm said. The projects are expected to deploy technologies such as home battery storage systems, electric vehicles, and local microgrids.

All three projects will be piloted and assessed in 2018, and could be expanded beyond the initial regions should they prove successful, Nissan said, promising that progress updates would be published throughout the year.

The announcement was made yesterday in Oslo, where Nissan unveiled the new version of its LEAF electric passenger car, alongside plans for a new e-NV200 electric van, investment in its European fast charging network, and a new range of home charging and power storage systems.

Gareth Dunsmore, electric vehicle director at Nissan Europe, said around 1.3 billion people worldwide live in communities where power generation and access to electricity is restricted, highlighting a clear need to expand electricity and mobility to these new markets.

“With a rapidly rising, urbanising global population, problems like access to energy, climate change, and poor air quality all risk getting worse rather than better,” said Dunsmore. “We’ve been asking ourselves: ‘How can we use our global reach and history of innovation, to help build a brighter, electric future for everyone?’ What better place to start than by bringing power and mobility to people in a sustainable and equitable way?”

One of the projects will see Nissan build a micro-grid system to provide power for local communities without access to electricity in a developing country in a bid to boost healthcare and education provision, the firm said.

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A report, “New York City’s Aging Power Plants: Risks, Replacement Options and the Role of Energy Storage” was prepared by Stratagen Consulting for the New York Battery and Energy Storage Consortium. The report describes a developing crisis of a large part of the Big Apple’s power plant infrastructure in varying stages of overdue retirement. Thousands of megawatts of steam and gas turbine systems, responsible for much of New York City’s non-carbon pollution, especially in proximate low-income communities, are apparently beyond effective retrofitting and their electricity generation, especially during peak hours, need to be replaced. At present, only a few hundred megawatts are at the facility study phase, which may mean an earliest date of online startup of 2021.

This challenge is especially acute due to constricted resource and demand needs. New York City generates slightly more than half its electricity locally, and cannot easily access clean power from hydro or wind power sources due to lack of transmission, particularly during daytime peak hours. On a statewide basis, the growth of natural gas sourced electricity threatens carbon reduction goals.

The Stratagen study determined that a serious commitment to energy storage systems would make them economically competitive with new leaker plants. Like solar and other renewable energy, energy storage would require long term contracts and NY Independent System Operator compensation for financial viability. An interesting note is that peakers apparently operate at less than 10%, below the capacity factor of PV, with energy storage providing dispatching capability to solar. New York City ratepayers meanwhile pay $268 million a year in capacity charges for peakers, which could finance energy storage instead.

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PALO ALTO, U.S. — Tesla’s massive Australian energy-storage facility, which CEO Elon Musk vowed to build quickly after regional outages, will be equipped with battery cells from Samsung SDI instead of main supplier Panasonic. 

The decision to use Samsung SDI is a blow to Panasonic, which has its hands full with orders for electric-vehicle batteries. To meet a self-imposed deadline of 100 days, Tesla turned to the South Korean company since it could swiftly supply the cells. Tesla is importing the cells to the U.S. for final assembly before sending them to Australia — apparently taking the promotional benefits over profit.

Following blackouts last year in South Australia, Musk took to Twitter this March, offering to solve the state’s problems in the form of a bet: “Tesla will get the [battery] system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free.”

The South Australia state government then placed an order for one the world’s largest battery systems, capable of storing 100,000kW — enough to power roughly 30,000 homes. 

Tesla is poised to drastically expand sales of large energy-storage facilities in other regions. The U.S. company is likely to more heavily tap into Samsung SDI’s excess capacity in the future as it grows the business.

Taiwan and other areas that have experienced widespread blackouts are considering purchasing Tesla battery storage as well.

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Duke University brain science researchers are hoping to use electronics they developed for non-invasive brain stimulation to revolutionize energy storage technology, making batteries safer, more efficient and less expensive.

The idea to apply brain science technologies to battery technology came from Stefan Goetz, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science, electrical engineering and neurosurgery, along with a colleague, Angel Peterchev, associate professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

For more than a decade Goetz has been creating electronics for non-invasive brain stimulation that allow signals from outside the brain to be processed and acted on inside the brain, he explained.

However, he also had some experience with cars. “I started my Ph.D with an advisor who was a power engineer who worked on drives for vehicles,” he said. “I knew a little about it and recognized the problems with batteries. It appeared to me they could be solved if you modified some of the circuits.”

He and his colleagues started looking for funding. They received funding from Duke University’s Energy Research Seed Fund for developing a prototype battery and conversion system, $500,000 from the National Science Foundation for developing, along with other researchers, control systems to optimize use of the battery system, plus car-part donations from Toyota and BMW, said Goetz.

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SaltX Technology and Vattenfall have signed off on a Letter of Intent to lead a pilot program based on SaltX’s large-scale energy storage technology — EnerStore.

The pilot project will be developed in one of Vattenfall’s district heating networks and will be used to verify SaltX EnerStore technology in full-scale. The project is expected to start in the second half of 2017 — with the first phase expected to run for 18 months.

Sweden’s leading technology consultant – Sweco – will perform the project engineering of the pilot plant, while Stockholm University will lead the validation measurements and performance tests.

Karl Bohman, CEO of SaltX Technology, said: “Vattenfall is the perfect match for us and has the resources and extensive experience to make this pilot project a success. Their technical skills and commercial verification will be very valuable as we launch EnerStore on the market.”

Vattenfall will host the pilot plant and support the operation and maintenance of the pilot project.

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Senators rushed to file a slate of energy storage bills in recent days ahead of hearings on the subject scheduled for next week. 

On Tuesday, the House Energy & Commerce Committee will question energy industry leaders on reliability and resilience. At the same time, the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources will hold a hearing specifically on energy storage. 

Those events could bring attention to the new legislation aimed at boosting federal support for the emerging technology. At a discussion hosted by the Advanced Energy Storage Caucus on Wednesday, industry leaders said they hope to cast energy storage as a resource that “helps everyone,” aiming to avoid the partisan divides that characterize support for renewables or fossil fuels on Capitol Hill. 

“Energy storage as infrastructure is enough of a bipartisan topic,” Ted Ko, vice president for policy at Stem, said about the Franken bill, which would fund storage R&D for grid resilience. “There’s a dozen different critical infrastructures in the U.S. and energy is probably the one the others all depend on, so investing in R&D for that is I think a bipartisan issue that should give that legislation a little more legs.”

Provisions for DOE demonstration projects and technical assistance on storage could help utilities integrate the new technology into their long-term generation planning, said Jason Burwen, policy and advocacy director at the Energy Storage Association.

“There’s a recognition of putting storage into the planning processes of utilities, particularly of smaller utilities and munis and co-ops that may not have human capital and may be resource constrained,” he said. “That’s going to be transformative for those folks to figure out how does this cost-benefit work out … how do we value the resilience aspects and then how do we make this make sense not just for a one-off procurement but part of a long term resource plan?”

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Energy demands from developing countries are going to grow by about 10 per cent between now and 2040, according to the US Energy Information Administration. By that year, they will be using 65 per cent of the world’s total energy supply.

But although new renewable energy technology can be adopted quickly, the basic energy infrastructure in the developing world is lagging behind. As a result, energy supplies are nowhere near as reliable. And that’s a problem. “In some places we have hospitals that have 12 hours of blackouts a day,” says Enass Abo-Hamed, chief executive and co-founder of hydrogen storage startup H2GO.

If electricity could be stored on-site for when it is needed, outages would be far less frequent. But the cost of existing battery technology is prohibitive. Abo-Hamed and her colleagues are working on an innovative way of storing hydrogen gas that can be burned in fuel cells. The system uses nanomaterials to create a partially flexible sponge that is able to trap hydrogen atoms in its pores. The gas can later be released by heating the structure.

“Once you reach the required temperature, the structure gets distorted and releases the hydrogen,” says Abo-Hamed. It’s a bit like pushing corks out of bottles. But first, you have to get hydrogen. From splitting water molecules (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen. H2GO will use a water electrolyser for this process. Abo-Hamed says that, based on their calculations, a medium to large hospital in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, would need about 50 litres of water per hour. About 80 to 90 per cent of this supply is returned after the hydrogen is burned to make power, and can therefore be used again.

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