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

The U.S. arm of Alevo, the cash-strapped Swiss battery maker with a high-profile Russian investor, said Friday it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and laying off its 290 workers in Concord, in a blow to efforts to redevelop a former Philip Morris cigarette factory.

The company arrived in Cabarrus County in 2014 with great fanfare, vowing to create hundreds of jobs through its revolutionary energy-storage technology. But production and hiring lagged those projections. The company gained attention this spring when a Russian billionaire with a connection to President Donald Trump emerged as a new investor and installed former associates at the company.

In a statement, Alevo said it had made progress with its “groundbreaking battery technology,” but production challenges left it short on financing. It had been actively seeking new funding, but it wasn’t realized in time.

“This decision was driven by the formidable challenges of bringing a new technology into commercial production and lacking the financial wherewithal to continue on through repeated manufacturing delays,” Alevo Chief Financial Officer Peter Heintzelman said in a statement. “It is a sad day for our dedicated employees and partners, as well as for the promise of Alevo’s technology.”

The company planned to lay off 245 employees on Friday, followed by the remaining 45 by Sept. 30, according to a notice filed with the state. The company plans to immediately sell off assets, the filing said.

The news in 2014 that a startup technology company was taking over the former Philip Morris campus in Concord was a major boost for the city northeast of Charlotte, promising new jobs and tax dollars at the long-vacant 2,100-acre site. And in February, N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper praised Alevo’s plan to add more than 200 jobs in Concord in return for $2.6 million in tax incentives over 12 years.

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If the temporary blotting out of the sun next week magnifies an inherent weakness of solar power, it also plays to the strengths of energy storage.

Advanced energy storage technologies have the ability to charge or discharge at a moment’s notice to shore up the needs of the grid. Whether or not the market structures exist to fully capitalize on those abilities is another question.

There’s little grid storage to speak of directly on the path of totality, where the sun will be entirely covered for a period of 2.5 minutes on Monday. That swath cuts southeast from Oregon to South Carolina. Indianapolis Power & Light has a 20-megawatt system just off of the path. Farther from the line, the sun will be 60 to 80 percent obscuredabove many of the nation’s largest solar plants in California, Nevada and Arizona.

The California Independent System Operator expects this to cause a shortfall of 6,000 megawatts that otherwise would have been produced by solar power between 9 a.m. and noon. 

California also wields considerable storage capacity: approximately 3,000 megawatts, said Alex Morris, policy director at the California Energy Storage Alliance. Some 2,600 megawatts of that are from old-school pumped hydro, with newfangled batteries making up the difference.

Members of the storage industry hope their response to the eclipse will demonstrate the flexibility of this tool and expand the opportunities for storage to help the grid in future challenges.

The grid response

Dealing with capacity shortfalls, especially ones with as much advance predictability as this one, is no trouble for grid operators. All they have to do is call up additional gas generators to pump out electrons when the sun starts to darken. This can get expensive, though, and involves a lot more greenhouse gas production than the solar would have.

The other trick is what happens on the back end. Gas generators spin large metal turbines to generate electricity, and there are physical limitations to how quickly those machines can stop spinning without damaging themselves. Many plants also have minimum run times they need to hit to justify the cost of starting up and burning fuel.

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We are pleased to share our Energy Storage interview with Bono Ge, Senior Sales Manager, BYD Energy Storage in Europe.

How to make energy storage projects bankable?
First of all, the profitability of all energy storage projects is the most important factor to manufacturers, developers, operators, investors and so on. To make the energy storage projects bankable, I believe joint efforts from the industry are desired. Manufacturers need to control the cost and quality and prolong the duration of operation life of products, this will give other players in the chain more flexibility. Developers need to make a clearer definition of the project and well budget the project at the beginning. Operators shall operate the system as pre-defined and try to search for more revenue streams for energy storage systems. Investors shall do their best to provide less expensive funding. At the same time, regulators need to initiate and create better policies for the market.

How to best reduce the costs of energy storage?
At the right moment, energy storage price is mainly based on the battery price. And battery cost down is primarily driven by the automotive industry. For example, 95% of BYD’s battery production has been utilised on the vehicles while only 5% has been used for stationary energy storage. So to increase the energy storage market size is the key point to reduce the cost. The other way is standardisation, market players need to make clearer on the product definition and figure out specifications within the industry. This will help to reduce the production and maintenance cost.

How to create more standardisation and clearer specifications?
Regulators need to be clear about what are desired and make clear about the revenue streams for energy storage users. Based on the policies and revenue streams, manufacturers can figure out the specifications with other players in the chain to work out the specifications and the produce standard products for the market. Like in the UK, FFR, EFR are the main opportunities for energy storage, and people can forecast that that market will last for some time, then they will be encouraged to design and accept standard products.

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The rules for New Mexico’s IRP only state that investor-owned electric and gas utilities’ resource planning processes have to evaluate all feasible “supply side” and “demand side” resources on a “comparable and consistent basis.” The rules were written before energy storage was a commercially feasible alternative to supply-side and demand-side resources.

In the amendment, PRC staff noted that energy storage’s benefits can occur at any stage, from generation of electricity to transmission and distribution.

Staff suggested it would be helpful to the policy development to require utilities to produce a cost/benefit analysis of energy storage options considered, and why they were rejected.

PNM is the only utility in New Mexico with energy storage capability at present. PNM’s Prosperity Energy Storage project includes a 500 kV solar PV facility with a 250kW, 1 MWh energy storage system.

“All of the participants in this rulemaking case, including our three investor-owned utilities, supported this amendment to the IRP rule, a consensus reflecting that energy storage should be considered as a resource in New Mexico’s utilities’ long-term planning,” Commission Vice Chair Cynthia Hall said in a statement.

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The potentially industry crippling home battery installation safety guideline proposed by Standards Australia has again been slammed by the industry, as fundamentally flawed and – if passed – certain to throw the energy storage industry into chaos, both in Australia and overseas.

In a newsletter to members on Tuesday, Australia’s Energy Storage Council said that the current Draft Battery Standard ASNZ5139 – which effectively bans the installation of lithium-ion battery storage systems inside homes and garages on the basis that they are a fire risk – needed to be completely re-written.

“The draft Standard is not evidence-based and has enormous implications for the Australian and global battery storage industry,” the ESC said.

“The Energy Storage Council will oppose the adoption of the Draft Standard. The Energy Storage Council will vote against the Draft Standard and will urge other committee members to do the same.”

The call to arms comes at the close of a nine-week consultation period, during which time the draft standard was open for public submissions by Standards Australia, attracting more than 2,900 public submissions.

The submissions will now be “considered in detail”, and “resolved” by the technical committee, with any “substantive changes” released for further consultation. Once all comments are resolved, the SA technical committee will hold a vote to decide whether the document is published, or not.

As we first reported here, the draft standard, which requires battery systems to be located outside of homes and garages, in purpose-built “kiosks” or “bunkers,” was first aired in February this year, but was thought to have been hosed down after a major industry-side backlash.

It resurfaced in June, however, as part of the draft voluntary standard for On-Site Battery Systems, when it was released by Standards Australia for nine weeks of public consultation.

In a June 13 media release, SA said that the draft standard – which it noted had “not been without controversy” – currently included provisions to minimise the risk of self-sustaining fires.

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TAIPEI — The Taiwanese government is planning to approach Tesla to discuss the feasibility of setting up lithium ion battery facilities for storing renewable energy on the island, in line with a project the U.S. technology company recently launched in Australia, a top official said on Thursday following a mass power blackout earlier in the week.

The move would also chime with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s ongoing efforts to replace nuclear power with green energy. Tsai has pledged to make Taiwan nuclear energy free by 2025.

“Tesla is using its lithium ion battery technology to help Australia and California to implement smart grid and grid storage, and we can learn from them in the future,” Taiwan’s Minister of Science and Technology Chen Liang-gee told reporters at his office in Taipei.

“We will try to check out whether there is a suitable solution…we will get in touch with them,” Chen said.

Chen added that the government would send a team of officials to the U.S. to talk with Tesla soon, although he would not be heading the delegation.

He said that the government had not prepared a budget for such a project, although he suggested that a Taiwanese company could potentially form a joint venture with the U.S. tech company for the project.

Tesla, which is also known for its electric cars, declined to comment.

Taiwan was hit by a mass power outage on Tuesday, the largest by number of households affected since a massive earthquake struck in 1999.

The blackout came after government-run petroleum company CPC Corporation ran into difficulties while replacing the power supply for a control system responsible for sending natural gas to a power plant.

A number of tech companies in Taiwan have suffered some minor disruption to production following the outage.

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California’s grid operations will be supported by the ramping of an estimated 3,000MW of energy storage, when a solar eclipse expected across the Pacific North-West of the US will cause PV generation to dip.

The California Energy Storage Alliance (CESA) trade group issued a statement on Tuesday, asserting that the near-three hour period when the California sun is obscured by the passing moon, between 9:02am and 11:54am local time, will see energy storage ramping to support the grid and providing energy and other support services.

According to CESA, the ability of energy storage to also ramp down i.e. take energy off the grid as well as put energy into it, will be a useful tool for the grid as solar generators start to come back on when the eclipse is over. The sun in Northern California will be 76% obscured, while the sun in Southern California will be 62% blocked out.    

“The eclipse is an important example of how energy storage can help the grid,” Alex Morris, policy director at CESA, said.

“Whether ‘front of meter’ or aggregated customer-sited (behind the meter) storage, energy storage solutions – as part of the electric grid ‘tool-kit’ – not only provide benefits to the environment and the grid, but can also help customers manage electricity costs.”

Morris also said energy storage is “an innovative part of the California grid that provides key capabilities for operating a cleaner and more affordable grid, while also ramping up extremely quickly to meet electricity needs when solar power wanes, as we expect during the August 21st eclipse.”

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Black start with ‘Kickstarter’