The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) assessment of reliability and security of the country’s electrical grid network is “encouraging”, the Energy Storage Association’s head has said in her initial reaction to the report’s publication.

Energy secretary Rick Perry ordered his staff in April to produce the report, which was published on Wednesday. Described as a comprehensive analysis and including recommendations to policymakers, regulators and the general public on future policy options, the DOE has now invited the public to offer comments on the “Staff reports on electricity markets and reliability” report via its website.

Our sister site PV Tech reported today that the omission of passages supportive of renewable energy economics – in relation to fluctuating fossil fuel prices – found in a leaked early draft of the document were expunged from the final version. Some PV industry figures also commented to say that the report overstated the challenges in integrating renewables, while others expressed their satisfaction that the study was undertaken in the first place.    

Meanwhile, DOE appears to consider energy storage as a vital part of the grid-level toolkit – if there is a desire to integrate increasing levels of variable renewable energy.

“Energy storage will be critical in the future if higher levels of VRE are deployed on the grid and require additional balancing of energy supply and demand in real time,” the report says, in a section on energy storage.

Perhaps ominously, the same section concludes: “However, the need for storage may not be as great for a grid more reliant on traditional baseload generation.”

With President Trump extolling the virtues of so-called “clean coal” in the past few days, some alarm bells might be raised by the ambiguous language.

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The US Army will add a 1 megawatt energy storage system to accompany its 10-megawatt SunPower-built solar PV system which recently broke ground at the Redstone Arsenal US army post in Alabama.

US-based solar company SunPower revealed on Wednesday that the US Army will be adding a 1 MW (megawatt) energy storage system to a 10 MW solar project being developed by SunPower at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama — a project which will drive employment of up to 200 jobs at the peak of construction. The project was jointly developed by the US Army Office of Energy Initiatives, Redstone Arsenal’s Directorate of Public Works, and the US Army Corps of Engineers Huntsville Center’s Energy Division, and its development is being financed by a power purchase agreement (PPA) which opens the way for the US Army to buy 100% of the electricity generated by the project without having to pay for the construction, maintenance, or operation of the project. Specifically, the Army will purchase 18,000 MWh of electricity from the project at a cost equal to or less than Redstone Arsenal’s current and projected utility rates.

“This project reinforces the Army’s commitment to advancing adoption of reliable, cost-effective, home-grown renewable energy at Redstone Arsenal,” said Col. Thomas Holliday, Garrison Commander, Redstone Arsenal. “We’re continually looking for ways to grow our capability and reduce our cost to provide the nation with a more efficient defense.”

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If you’ve heard that energy storage can reduce what you pay in demand charges, and you’re wondering if it would work for your operation, check out a paper issued today by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Clean Energy Group (CEG).

The paper finds that 25 percent of commercial customers in the U.S. – five million – pay demand charge rates of more than $15/kW, a threshold that may justify investment in energy storage.

“With this analysis, we have identified the areas where customers have the greatest potential to benefit from investments in battery storage. Utilities know where these opportunities exist, and now the rest of us have that information too,” said Seth Mullendore, co-author of “Identifying Potential Markets for Behind-the-Meter Battery Energy Storage: A Survey of U.S. Demand Charges,” and a CEG project director.

The report notes that many customers do not fully understand how demand is measured and billed — despite the fact that demand charges often represent from 30–70 percent of a commercial electric bill.

Defining demand charges

Demand charges are a somewhat murky and daunting. Applied to commercial and industrial customers (not usually homeowners), they are typically calculated based on the point in time when wholesale prices are highest. If a company can pinpoint that 15 minutes or so and reduce its consumption, it can lower its energy bills for the billing cycle.  To do so, the company must predict correctly when the grid will reach that period of peak demand and then act fast.

Battery energy storage is a particularly good tool for the task because of its flexibility; it’s relatively easy to discharge the battery so that your facility uses its energy – rather than grid power – at the right moment. On-site solar can be used to reduce demand charges too, but not if the sky is cloudy just then.

Battery software is a key factor here. Advanced platforms use what the report calls “learning algorithms” to gauge when a facility is approaching peak demand. Add solar and the management software can employ a more sophisticated demand management strategy. It may make sense to incorporate microgrid-level intelligence if more forms of distributed energy are added to the system. Or, as the paper points out, a microgrid may be warranted if the facility wants the added ability to island and secure power from its onsite resources during an outage.

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Nine-hour requirement adds big cost

A recent project in California may be the first of its kind—at least in the U.S.—in which large-scale batteries actually fired up a generator to restore the grid operations without a power feed from the transmission network or backup source. In May, the Imperial Irrigation District’s (IID)  new energy storage system provided the electricity needed to get its 44-MW combined-cycle natural gas turbine going at the El Centro station .

This is a big deal in the expansion of energy storage capabilities, proponents say.

“From where I sit and what I know, I’m not aware of anybody else able and willing to do so,” said Mirko Molinari, manager of distributed energy resource development for GE Power, one of the partners in the IID energy storage project.  “It was not a simple task.”

Energy storage systems play several roles within the grid connection, from load following to load smoothing to frequency regulation. Now, at least in this case and likely others to follow, it can play a startup role before converting back to absorbing power from the functioning grid.

“The biggest question is whether this is a game changer,” said Matt Roberts, vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Energy Storage Association. “No, but it’s one of the new value streams this system can deliver.”

Juggling all of those streams is exceedingly complex, GE’s Molinari pointed out. Software and control systems must wade through all the immediate and intermittent inputs of a grid system which is processing flow from renewables as well as facing resiliency challenges once a gap develops in electron flow.

“The grid is the biggest machine ever built by humankind,” Molinari noted. “All of these renewables are pushing a lot of complexity down to the grid management. . . How do you manage all of this together?”

IID’s energy storage system went online in October 2016, and the black start was performed nearly seven months later in May. The partners in the project include Coachella Energy Storage Partners LLC, ZGlobal Inc. and GE Energy Connections (now part of GE Power).

Historically, an operative grid would be restarted by a backup diesel generator or some other form of generation, giving the main turbine time to get going again and synchronize and keep frequency steady on the system.

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Lithium-ion batteries have the lion’s share of the stationary battery storage market, giving many manufacturers the opportunity to realize economies of scale, but on the flipside, makes it that much harder for new technologies to gain a foothold in the market.

So far this year, at least two battery manufacturers working on novel technologies have declared bankruptcy.

In March, Aquion Energy filed for bankruptcy. Aquion was known for its aqueous hybrid ion battery technology, which the company touted as a safer and cheaper alternative to li-ion batteries. Aquion emerged from bankruptcy last month, being acquired at auction by Juline-Titans LLC, a company about which little is known except that it has ties to the China Titans Energy Technology Group.

And late last week, Alevo USA and Alevo Manufacturing, both part of Alevo Group, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection. At one point, Alevo was seen as a rival to Tesla. In 2014, the company said it planned to invest $1 billion to convert an old Philip Morris cigarette factory in North Caroline to a sleek new facility capable of producing several gigawatts of batteries a year.

Alevo was also trying to gain a market edge with a lithium-iron-phosphate battery chemistry that it claimed would be the first to use an inorganic electrolyte based on sulfur. The company said that chemistry would allow its batteries to cycle more frequently and with less heat and degradation than li-ion batteries.

Alevo had a three-pronged approach to the market. It planned to target state-owned utilities overseas, individual utilities, especially in the United States, and to tap commercial markets such as the market for frequency regulation in the PJM Interconnection region.

Alevo also did not want to limit itself to just selling batteries. It was looking to sell storage as a service. That may have been easier than convincing a developer of the merits of its technology, but it also meant that in addition to competing against established, incumbent li-ion battery manufacturers such as Tesla and Panasonic, Alevo was also taking on companies such as AES Energy Storage, Greensmith and S&C Electric.

The company also shunned government funding, relying instead on private investors, including funding from Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev.

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Regulations for the safe use of energy storage systems still need adaptation to “accommodate a broader use of energy storage with higher energy content like lithium-ion batteries in private homes”, experts at Fraunhofer ISE (Institute for Solar Energy Systems) have said.

In an exclusive technical paper article contributed to the last edition of Solar Media’s downstream solar technology journal, PV Tech Power, and now available to download from this website, Fraunhofer’s department head for electrical energy storage Dr Matthias Vetter and battery modules and systems expert Stephan Lux discuss two research projects into the safety of stationary energy storage systems for households, including their use for self-consumption of solar PV generated onsite.

With funding from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), Project ‘Safety First’ looks at the standards and quality of energy storage systems for homes currently available on the market, including how well they connect and interface with the grid. The other project, Project ‘SpeiSi’ looks specifically at the safety and reliability of stationary energy storage systems for PV self-consumption.

In the article, Vetter and Lux look at existing provisions for safety, mainly through the lens of their own domestic market in Germany, where more than 50,000 residential energy storage systems have been sold to date already and existing safety guidelines, published by national solar trade group BSW Solar, are voluntary.

From there, the authors explain what they think is necessary to bring energy storage into the mainstream, for utilities, financiers, other industry players and for customers. Key topics include battery lifetimes and charge-discharge cycling, the threat of thermal runaway, which causes lithium-ion batteries to combust and the safety and reliability of switching devices.   

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Lithium-air batteries may or may not ever happen, but it’s not for lack of trying. Toyota Motor Europe is one of the funders behind a new MIT study that dives into the mysteries of this elusive energy storage technology, which promises to triple the power per weight of conventional lithium-ion batteries.

Lithium-air technology translates into lighter, cheaper EV batteries and better range — if anybody can ever figure out how to get them to work in an EV.

EVs And The Lithium-Air Energy Storage Unicorn

Lithium-air batteries literally replace some of the lithium with an air flow, which is why they save on weight.

Back in 2010 the US Energy Department laid out the challenge facing EVs in the auto market…

An EV that is cost-competitive with gasoline would require a battery with twice the energy storage of today’s state-of-the-art Li-Ion battery at 30% of the cost.

…and tagged Li-air energy storage technology as one promising solution:

Li-Air batteries are better than the Li-Ion batteries used in most EVs today because they breathe in air from the atmosphere for use as an active material in the battery, which greatly decreases its weight. Li-Air batteries also store nearly 700% as much energy as traditional Li-Ion batteries. A lighter battery would improve the range of EVs dramatically.

So, how are we doing? After all, it’s been seven years since the Energy Department wrote up its wish list.

The problem, as summed up by MIT writer David Chandler, is a triple whammy:

But that theoretical promise has been limited in practice because of three issues: the need for high voltages for charging, a low efficiency with regard to getting back the amount of energy put in, and low cycle lifetimes, which result from instability in the battery’s oxygen electrode.

Phooey!

CleanTechnica has been periodically checking on the progress of Li-air energy storage since 2010, and researchers have been trying all sorts of things to resolve any or all of those three issues, from genetically modified viruses to ordinary pencils. Researchers at MIT have also been looking into glass-based Li-air batteries.

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What goes up must come down. This principle applies to most things in our current gravitational setup — college tuition being a conspicuous exception — and it could provide a significant boost to green energy initiatives, too.

A California-based company called Advanced Rail Energy Storage (ARES) is using the power of gravity to help renewable energy utilities compete with coal and gas. The idea is to help solve the perennial problem of energy storage. Because wind and solar installations can’t always generate energy on demand — sometimes it’s cloudy and the air is still — green utilities need a reliable method of storing surplus energy.

There are several ways to do this using high-tech industrial batteries, flywheels, or hydroelectric facilities, but these approaches tend to be expensive and complicated.

ARES’s solution? Run some old trains up and down a hill.

The company harnesses the power of potential and kinetic energy to help utilities add and subtract to the energy grid as needed. When the wind or solar farm is producing excess energy, that power is shuttled over to the adjacent ARES facility. The surplus energy is used to power repurposed electric locomotives, which in turn haul enormously heavy railroad cars to the top of a hill.

When less energy is being produced but more is needed for the grid, the railroad cars roll back down, turning potential energy back into kinetic energy by powering onboard generators with the force of their descent. The technique is similar to the regenerative braking system that is used in electric and hybrid vehicles, which routes deceleration energy to the vehicle’s battery.

The system is also similar to existing hydroelectric (“pumped hydro”) solutions that essentially do the same things with water — pumping water uphill and capturing downhill flow. A benefit of the rail energy storage solution is that it doesn’t need to be near a large source of water. That’s good for wind and solar installations, which are often located in remote areas.

It’s cheaper, too. Ares contends that its rail energy solution costs about half as much as competing energy storage solutions, and has less of an environmental impact.

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Strategic location