With energy storage considered to be the “new wave” in the energy sector and increasingly becoming a reality, South Africa needs to prepare itself if it wishes to take advantage of the energy storage growth opportunities within the energy storage stationary value chain and the mobility value chain, says State-owned development finance institutionIndustrial Development Corporation (IDC) senior project development manager Bertie Strydom.

Presenting an overview of an energy storage techno-economic study, in Johannesburg, on Thursday, he stressed that South Africa should not try to “reinvent the wheel”, but “should understand its competitive advantages and the sustainable opportunities within the respective value chains, start exploiting opportunities and secure its position in collaboration with key international partnerships”.

IDC divisional executive for agroprocessing, infrastructureand new industries Lizeka Matshekga, however, emphasised that South Africa could not afford to only become involved when local demand really takes off on the back of lower pricing.

“Energy storage is already on a similar cost path as photovoltaic and wind and some research indicates that the trajectory might be even quicker. If South Africa wants to be part of this lucrative industry, we need to act now,” she said on Thursday.

Energy storage could unlock opportunities for South Africa in mining and beneficiation, research and development, commercial exploitation, local industry development, developmental impact, as well as opportunities for South Africa in global market player aspirations, Strydom highlighted.

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ALISO VIEJO, CA–(Marketwired – Aug 15, 2017) – XsunX, Inc. (OTC PINK: XSNX), a leading solar and energy saving technologies provider, announced today that sales interest in its popular solar car/truck port, energy storage, and EV charging configurations now outpace all other product offerings.

“Earlier this year, we outlined our anticipation that a sizable portion of our revenue growth will come from the sale of our solar car/truck port systems along with energy storage technologies,” stated Tom Djokovich, CEO of XsunX, Inc. “Today our solar car/truck port systems make up approximately 70% of the over $3.4 million in our current project bid channel and clients routinely request energy storage and/or EV charging solutions to be included in approximately half of all project’s we quote.”

This advanced level of paired energy production, management, and use sophistication seems to be evolving as the driving force for XsunX’s trajectory. The use of solar canopies that provide clients with the ability to utilize previously underutilized facilities such as parking areas, storage, or loading docks, combined with intelligent energy storage and EV charging further underscores the value of the Company’s offerings through the ability to meet a full range of client needs.

“We believe the numbers in our growing sales, and sales channel, underscore the value of investments we made early on in developing this turn-key product group, and we look forward to capitalizing on the market interest in these hybrid solutions, concluded Mr. Djokovich.”

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With new energy storage projects seeming to come online every week, 2016 was likely the “turning point” for grid-connected batteries in the United States. Utility-scale battery storage installed capacity grew by 221 MW in 2016, aided by the falling price of battery cells. And longer-duration batteries are taking hold as well.

Platts’ report shows all of the nation’s grid-connected storage is in 12 states, and about 277 MW is focused on frequency regulation. However, more utilities are using storage as a way to defer costly infrastructure upgrades and skirt natural gas construction.

APS’ recent announcement is focused on deferring investment on a 20-mile transmission line. The battery will provide local generation during 20 to 30 peak power demand days per year, and on other days it will provide grid services to APS. The utility’s 15-year integrated resource plan calls for the addition of 500 MW of energy storage.

Southern California Edison, for instance, is another utility using storage as a way to avoid natural gas construction and cut emissions. SCE’s President Ron Nichols told Utility Dive the utility is also looking to pair energy storage with natural gas peakers to help cut emissions to meet California’s carbon goals.

“We will constantly be looking at, every time we need a new resource — how can we avoid the need to add another gas-powered resource?” Nichols told Utility Dive in an interview at the Energy Storage North America conference this week. “Even if they are built, they’re not gonna run much. They’re going to be there exclusively for reliability, full stop. That would be the only reason they’re added.”

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UltraCharge Limited (ASX: UTR) continues its push to establish itself as a major player in the global battery technology market.

The company has completed a review of its recently acquired battery technology and has identified an iron-based flow battery technology as the leading intellectual property.

A flow battery is a type of rechargeable electrochemical cell. The technology is fast growing in the energy storage market, as the value in having a storage solution for sources of renewable energy becomes more widely recognised. Currently, if energy produced by wind or solar can’t be stored then it goes to waste.

Flow battery technology supports the widespread use of renewable energy, for utility-scale applications and integration into energy grids.

When integrated with renewable energy sources, the technology provides energy reliability and availability. It allows for the storing of intermittently produced solar and wind power, which can be dispatched into the electricity grid to meet demand as it arises.

This makes for efficient use of renewable energy by enabling load balancing during peak demand and off-peak power storage, resulting in an uninterrupted power supply.

A look at costs and competition

Initial analysis by UTR indicates the technology has low installation costs of around $250/kwh at a system cost of 1MW. Operating costs are estimated to be up to half the cost of diesel alternatives, while capital expenditure is predicted to be $200/kw DC.

By way of comparison, it is estimated that by 2020 Tesla’s PowerPack will run at 15 to 16c/kwh, higher than that of UTR’s Iron Flow storage solution at 13c/kwh.

The review follows the announcement earlier this month, that UTR had acquired new battery technology via an exclusive licensing agreement with NASDAQ-listed Arotech Corp.’s Epilsor Electric Fuel Limited.

This was a timely acquisition of new battery IP by Ultracharge, seeing as the renewable energy sector is expected to reach US$777 billion by 2019. That’s after demand for new energy storage technology rises by a massive 47% in the 2017 year.

The expected exponential growth in energy storage technologies will support UTR as it seeks to revolutionise the lithium battery market with a battery that is safe, has a longer lifetime, and is faster charging than that of existing lithium batteries.

It should be noted, however, that any further catalysts are speculative at this stage and should not be taken as guaranteed. Investors should seek professional financial advice for further information.

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The Renewables Infrastructure Group (TRIG) has become the latest investor to enter the large scale storage market after buying a 20MW project from RES for £20 million.

The Broxburn energy storage project is currently under construction in West Lothian, Scotland, and is expected to be completed early next year by RES, who will maintain the site as TRIG’s operations manager. It will be the first energy storage project acquired by TRIG and RES’ fourth project in the UK.

TRIG’s chair Helen Mahy CBE said: “The use of battery storage is becoming increasingly important in enabling grid networks to match fluctuations in the supply and demand of electricity and to stabilise power frequency. This becomes especially vital as the installed base of renewables generation increases.

“We are excited to be playing a part in this by investing in Broxburn, one of the first large-scale commercial power storage projects to be developed in the UK.”

The project is expected to have an operational life of 15 years but has secured an initial four year bespoke bilateral agreement to provide dynamic, two-way import and export sub-second balancing services to National Grid.

A spokesperson for RES explained: “This is a bilaterally negotiated service contract with NGET [National Grid Electricity Transmission]. Such an approach to contracting allows closer working ties than in a market-based approach and can be appropriate in the early stages of developing new services and creating new markets.”

RES secured this contract prior to last year’s Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) tender and provides the same service to National Grid that was hotly contested in August 2016.

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The prospect of paying for using charging stations isn’t as unpleasant as the anxiety of finding a station in the first place for some electric car owners. But as EVs and charging stations propagate, the opposite situation may emerge as charging stations will pay EV owners for selling juice back to the power grid.

The concept of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) mobile energy storage is a looming reality due to the fact that EVs are an excellent source of energy storage, something to which power companies do not have ready access. This makes fleets of EVs attractive as providers of energy, especially when there are a lot of them.

Nissan is among the first automakers to test vehicle-to-grid on a significant scale: The company has partnered with multinational power company Enel in Italy and the U.K., allowing EV owners to sell stored energy from their cars back to the power company. Nissan and Enel have installed 100 V2G units at private residences and at EV fleet parking lots, allowing owners to charge their EVs at low-demand periods when prices are low, then sell excess energy back to the grid during high-demand, higher-price periods, generating income for EV owners.

Nissan estimates that if all 18,000 Nissan EVs, including the Leaf and the e-NV200, were all connected to a V2G network, they could produce the equivalent of a 180-megawatt power plant. And if all cars in the U.K. were electric, their combined output could power the U.K., France and Germany taken together.

With the U.K.’s plans to phase out the sale of gas and diesel cars by 2040, that’s not as futuristic a concept as it sounds. This makes building an advanced EV power infrastructure with V2G capability a priority.

This concept has a few caveats: It takes hundreds of EVs for a V2G network to become a profit-producing operation, one with its own fixed costs (the V2G chargers themselves), and EV batteries that aren’t easily degraded by frequent charge and depletion cycles. Current lithium-ion batteries aren’t fond of repeated depletion, which means battery technology still needs to advance before all EVs will be safe to use for energy storage.

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The latest phase of a AUS$55 million (US$43.8 million) programme giving remote communities in Australia’s Northern Territory reliable and clean power will see a 2MWh battery installed and paired with more than 3,000 solar PV panels.

Daly River, a remote indigenous community in the Northern Territory, is projected to save 400,000 litres of diesel fuel each year with the installation of the 3,200 panel, 1MW PV system and co-located lithium-ion battery-based energy storage.

Our sister site PV Tech reported on the first phase of off-grid installations under the Solar Energy Transformation Program (SETuP) in late July. That wave of deployment fitted out 3.325MW of PV projects across 10 different communities in the Northern Territory, using solar PV-diesel hybrid generation solutions without battery storage.

In total, the AUS$55 million SETuP scheme will install 10MW of solar across 28 remote communities. AUS$27.5 million of the scheme’s cost has been supplied by the national government, via the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) with other funding coming from the Northern Territory government and its local Power and Water Corporation.

The 1MW PV / 2MWh battery storage Daly River project is the only one of the SETuP installations to use batteries in conjunction with PV. ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said he hoped Daly River could serve to demonstrate how reliance on diesel could be reduced or eliminated altogether, while Northern Territory Power and Water Corporation chief exec Michael Thomson said the Daly River plant would reduce the town’s diesel consumption by 50% and meet half of total energy demand.

Thomson called it: “…An effective demonstration of dependable technology use”.

“As battery costs reduce over the next few years, solar and battery technology will become more and more economically compelling as an alternative to traditional ways of powering remote communities. We’re excited to see the outcomes of the Daly River installation which will help guide deployment of more renewable energy in other remote communities as the technology becomes more cost effective,” ARENA CEO Frischknecht said.

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The outlook for the utility-side-of-the-meter energy storage industry is bright. IHS Markit reports that the global pipeline for utility-side energy storage has doubled in the past years to 3.4 gigawatts. It also predicts strong growth for this market in the coming years. In addition, the Bloomberg New Energy Finances Outlook 2016 report indicates that the global energy storage market will be valued at $250 billion by 2040, with some 25 gigawatts in capacity installed by 2028. Clearly, there’s a strong upside for utilities interested in investing in the growing energy storage market.

Energy Storage Offers Many Benefits to Utilities

Utilities are beginning to reap economic benefits by implementing energy storage systems. One of the main ways they’re doing this is by providing opportunities for money savings to customers through peak demand shaving. Energy storage can be used to shift electricity demand from on-peak to off-peak periods, which alleviates peak demand charges – resulting in savings for customers while reducing strain on the grid. There are many other ways utilities can benefit from energy storage as well:

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The rise of electric vehicles and the quest to find solutions to energy storage for the renewables industry have created a breeding ground for tech experts to develop battery technologies.

Last week, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy and the company he currently backs, Ionic Materials, unveiled a solid-state alkaline battery design that they claim would be cheaper and safer than the lithium-ion battery.

“What people didn’t really realize is that alkaline batteries could be made rechargeable,” Joy told Bloomberg in a phone interview last week. “I think people had given up,” Joy noted.

The three main possible applications of the new alkaline battery technology would be consumer electronics, electric cars, and energy storage for the power grid, according to the developers.

However, also according to Joy, the company just has the material, and the technology is not ready to go commercial right away. The rechargeable alkaline battery technology could be ready for commercial use within five years, Joy told Bloomberg, adding that Ionic Materials didn’t have a factory to manufacture the tech.

The prototype designs have demonstrated up to 400 recharge cycles for the alkaline battery, and Ionic Materials believes that the number of recharge cycles could be tripled, the New York Times reports.

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Founder and CEO Paul Nahi last night announced his resignation from Enphase, the PV microinverter maker and energy management specialist, which also makes its own AC Battery for energy storage.

Nahi revealed his decision during the company’s most recent earning’s call last night, when second quarter results for this year were discussed. The results showed a revenue improvement over the previous quarter but the company continues a difficult journey to become profitable and continues to face strong competition in the inverter sector of the solar industry. 

“It has been an enormous privilege to lead Enphase since inception and through its growth to become a leading global energy technology company,” Paul Nahi said.

“Our invention of the microinverter and the introduction of module level data monitoring has transformed the global solar energy landscape. Having managed Enphase from a concept through global leadership, I feel the time is right for a new CEO to continue its growth, while Enphase increases market share, expands into new geographies and explores new opportunities.”

While Enphase has deployed more than 650,000 systems in over 100 countries, including 15 million microinverters, the company is still battling to turn a profit in a highly competitive space. The company netted revenues of US$74.7 million in Q2 2017, 36% up from the previous quarter, shipping 224MW (DC) of microinverters. This meant a quarterly reduction in GAAP losses, from US$23.3 million in Q1 to US$12.1 million in Q2.

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