What is meant by “externalized costs”?

Externalized costs are costs associated with energy consumption which is not reflected in the selling price of the energy. These costs are directly or indirectly paid by other sectors of the economy in forms such as increased healthcare expenditures, losses in property values, increased costs associated with natural disasters, and a reduction in the free services rendered by the biosphere.

Externalized costs of battery storage

Environmental impacts of battery technology arise primarily from substantial quantities of embodied energy required and the mining of rare-earth materials. Li-ion batteries are by far the most thoroughly studied subject and we will assume that their external cost also applies to other battery chemistries.

A very recent review of 113 studies has provided a good summary of the environmental impacts of Li-ion batteries.  As can be seen in the summary graph below, significant scatter is present between different studies and different Li-ion battery chemistries.

Key for environmental impacts: ADP = Abiotic depletion, AP = Acidification, GWP = global warming potential, EP = Eutrophication, ODP = Ozone depletion and HTP = Human toxicity.

Key for battery chemistries: LFP = Lithium-ion phosphate, LTO = Titanate, LCO = Lithium Cobalt oxide, LCN = Lithium cobalt nickel oxide, LMO = Litium manganese oxide, NCM = Lithium cobalt manganese oxide, NCA = Lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide.

The global warming potential is the most commonly studied topic in the literature and returns average equivalent CO2 emissions of about 110 g/Wh. For perspective, this implies a CO2 cost of 6.6 tons for the 60 kWh battery pack of the Chevy Bolt – equivalent to 40000 miles of gasoline emissions in a Prius.

However, the study notes that, although global warming potential is the most studied environmental impact of Li-ion batteries, it is arguably less important than other aspects. The following graph is presented where average environmental impacts are normalized by the total impact in Europe.

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NEW YORK — Energy storage developers and utilities in New York are working with NYISO to establish dual participation of storage in retail and wholesale markets.

The goal is to boost storage growth “to get to the gigawatt level, where just five years ago we were talking about one megawatt,” Martha Symko-Davies said in New York on Thursday.

Symko-Davies, program manager for energy systems integration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, headed a panel on storage integration at the Infocast New York Energy REVolution Summit held last week in Times Square.

The panel discussed the industry’s progress since FERC last November issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking aimed at knocking down market barriers to storage and distributed energy resources (RM16-23, AD16-20). (See FERC Rule Would Boost Energy Storage, DER.)

Tim Banach, vice president of development for microgrid developer GI Energy, said that in the past, “there was little to no coordination with the utility around where these projects would be sited and what impacts the projects might have on the utility grid, both beneficial or potentially doing some harm.”

Now GI Energy is working with U.K.-based software developer Smarter Grid Solutions on storage demonstration projects for Consolidated Edison.

Graham Ault, executive vice president of Smarter Grid, said his company has mainly developed technology to manage DER for utilities. “The same technology as developed for and used by utilities is highly relevant to the owners and operators of fleets of DER, and that is what we as a company are addressing,” Ault said. “The GI Energy-Con Edison project is an excellent example of that.”

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According to LAVA, the architectural firm responsible for the new energy storage centre’s design, the end result for the project will be a giant water tank, based off an old gas tank that once reflected Germany’s energy policy in the 1950s.

The storage centre will provide information on sustainable power and renewable resources. Solar and wind energy generated on site will be used to heat up the water inside the tower to produce heat energy – which will then be sold.

“LAVA’s design will transform the new water tank, a cylindrical-shaped storage centre, into a dynamic sculpture, a city icon, a knowledge hub on sustainable energy, fully accessible to the public, a strong symbol of the transition towards renewables,” LAVA Director Tobias Wallisser said.

“Formally and geometrically the new water tank will not be much different from its predecessor. So this raised the challenge for us: How can the parameters of energy regeneration, decentrality, networking, flexibility and adaptivity be made visible in the design of the outer shell?

“How can an adaptive, dynamic system be produced without extreme technical control? Our task was to transform a big heavy industrial tank into a dynamic object,” Wallisser said.

The transformation of the tank involves a multi-layered facade structure inspired by the geometries of nature. An inner shell, an insulating layer of mineral wool panels of different shades of blue, wraps the building. A spiral helix staircase positioned around the cylinder continues the “energy loops” circling the structure rising dramatically up the facade to the top.

A cable network arranged between the annular supports forms the outer façade layer and gives depth and a varied, dynamic appearance. Approximately 11,000 diamond-shaped plates of stainless steel are hooked with an ingenious connection to this steel network, allowing them to rotate horizontally up to 45 degrees in the wind.

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Energy Secretary Rick Perry has been steadily pushing the Trump Administration deeper into clean tech territory, regardless of President* Trump’s pro-coal rhetoric. In the latest development, the Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory announced a new round of $5.7 million in funding for next-generation energy storage technology, aimed squarely at driving down the cost of electric vehicles and pumping up the range, to boot.

Perry is also steadily getting more frantic in his efforts to satisfy the inclinations of President Trump and the conservative base, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.

The new energy storage funding round comes under the Battery500 consortium, which is spearheaded by PNNL with a focus on improving lithium-metal batteries.

Battery500 was established under the Obama Administration in 2016. Back then, clean tech rated lavish attention from the Commander-in-Chief. Rather than leaving it up to the Energy Department, the White House took up the task of defining the Battery500 mission:

…The Battery500 Consortium aims to triple the specific energy (to 500 WH/kg) relative to today’s battery technology while achieving 1,000 electric vehicles cycles. This will result in a significantly smaller, lighter weight, less expensive battery pack (below $100/kWh) and more affordable EVs…

The $5.7 million in funding will go to 15 projects that fall into the seedling category, defined by PNNL as “new, potentially risky battery technologies that could pay off big and grow into significant energy storage solutions.”

Battery500 seems to have taken recent improvements in battery technology under consideration when setting a goal for the 15 projects. The current goal is to double, not triple specific energy:

Battery500 seeks to develop lithium-metal batteries that have more than double the specific energy found in batteries that power today’s electric cars. Specific energy measures the amount of energy packed into a battery based on its weight.

Meh, double, triple. It depends on where you set the level of specific energy typical of “today’s” EV batteries. PNNL currently puts that around the 170-200 watt mark.

Either way, the end result will be a new generation of EVs that could outrun gasmobiles on two key metrics, cost and range.

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The financial services arm of engineering giant Siemens will be offering no-money-down options for commercial and industrial (C&I) customers in the UK to purchase energy storage systems.

Siemens Financial Services announced yesterday that it will offer an “outcome-based” finance model for purchases of Siemens’ own-branded Siestorage energy storage systems, which are available to electricity users with on-site electricity demand profiles anywhere between 1MW and 100MW.

Instead of buying a lithium-ion battery-based Siestorage unit outright, customers will be expected to pay for the whole system based on battery output. Head of sales in energy finance for Siemens Financial Services, Ian Tyrer, said that customers would be paying for “what the technology delivers rather than the technology itself”.

Tyrer said that the offering of a “pay-for-outcome” financial model in itself was a growing trend across other divisions of Siemens’ business. A Siemens spokeswoman told sister title Energy-Storage.News that the outcome-based financing model has been launched only in the UK at present.

The value proposition for C&I customers is the reduction of their electricity bills. With C&I electricity users in the US, UK and many other territories, their electricity costs are calculated to charge them a premium for peak electricity use, although the models for billing them these amounts vary from market to market. Siestorage lets users arbitrage their electricity purchases and defer them to non-peak times, saving them not just power costs but network costs as well.

Energy storage systems allow businesses to reduce amounts of energy drawn from the grid without interrupting their business activities, industrial processes and so on. Adding energy storage can also add resiliency and stability to power supply, reducing exposure to outages, other unscheduled interruptions and changes in voltage.

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Energy storage prices are falling rapidly, allowing new combinations of solar, wind, and energy storage to “outcompete” the costs of coal and natural gas plants, according to a new study.

Research and development investment for energy storage projects have brought the cost of a lithium-ion battery down from $10,000 per kilowatt-hour in the early 1990s to an expected $100 per kilowatt-hour in 2018, the researchers said. Residential solar and electric battery storage could become cost-competitive with grid electricity by 2020, they added.

“Dramatic cost declines in solar and wind technologies, and now energy storage, open the door to a reconceptualization of the roles of research and deployment of electricity production, transmission, and consumption that enable a clean energy transition,” the study says.

Furthermore, meeting the carbon emissions-reduction goals, as outlined in the Paris climate agreement, will require a greater focus on research and development, the study notes.

The new study, “Energy Storage Deployment and Innovation for the Clean Energy Transition,” was authored by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, TU Munich, and the Center for Digital Technology Management in Germany and was published in the Monday issue of Nature Energy.

Wind turbines and solar panels generate power when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. They work intermittently, unlike gas- and coal-fired power plants, which can generate steady power as needed to meet consumer demand.

Various systems exist to deal with intermittency, from installing a lot more wind and solar over a large geographical area to storing surplus energy until it is needed. A wide array of technologies are used for energy storage, including solid state batteries, flow batteries, flywheels, and compressed air. Gigawatt-scale grid storage would improve the transmission and distribution system, resulting in lower future investments necessary to ensure grid stability and improve customer, according to the study.

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The U.S. Navy’s shipboard railgun is moving from the lab to the testing range, a big step for a weapon designed to fire massive bullets at hypersonic speeds. But a separate breakthrough in electrical pulse generation — capacitors that provide a bigger jolt in a smaller package — that may reshape the future of naval power.

The railgun’s electromagnets are designed to accelerate a Hyper Velocity Projectile from zero to some 8,600 kmph, about Mach 7. That velocity requires a lot of power. In early testing, the Office of Naval Research had relied on banks of commercial capacitors to pulse electricity to the gun. But they were “not suitable for integration aboard a ship” — too large to fit aboard Zumwalt-class destroyers, as Thomas Beutner, head of ONR’s Naval Air Warfare and Weapons Department, explained during a July event in Washington.

So ONR researchers developed their own capacitors, more compact yet capable of supplying 20 megajoules per shot, with a goal of 32 megajoules by next year. ONR said you can think of a megajoule as about the same, energy-wise, as a one-ton vehicle moving at 160 mph. These new capacitors “represent a new generation of pulse power, with an energy density of over a megajoule per cubic meter,” said Beutner. The capacitors, which store energy, are also able to recharge quickly enough in order to fire ten times in a per minute.

The entire point of the railgun is that it’s supposed to use the ship’s power, rather than rely on volatile fuel or gunpowder. But relying on ship power for a cannon that shoots Volkswagens can create huge fluctuations and power spikes. And the Navy wants future ships to power a lot of other things in addition to railguns, such as 150-kilowatt dronekilling lasers and powerful radar and electronic warfare systems. All of these pose “unique burdens on the power system,” Beutner said.

The capacitors, by storing more power in a smaller shell, even out the amount of power the ship’s generators have to produce, decreasing the possibility of a major electrical failure as a lasers, engine, railgun, and radar all (potentially) call for power at once. In this way, they serve not only as an energy store but also a sort of power adaptor.

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Deepwater and Tesla, two powerhouse clean energy companies, are pairing up for the biggest offshore wind and battery storage project so far. The 144 MW project was submitted as a bid for a 15-20 year contract under the RFP to help the state meet its goal of 1,200 MW of new renewable energy.

The Revolution Wind project would be located 30 miles off the coast near New Bedford. According to a Deepwater Wind press release, the wind farm and storage system would help Massachusetts meet two policy goals: the 1,200 MW of new renewables and open the door for more offshore wind development, key to the state meeting its separate goal of 1,600 MW of offshore wind by 2027. This project, however, will not count toward the offshore wind target since it was not submitted as a bid under its recent RFP, a spokesperson from Deepwater Wind said. 

Deepwater Wind is already a familiar name in the offshore wind sector. The developer successfully completed the United States’ first offshore wind project, the 30 MW Block Island wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. Deepwater Wind is also working on offshore wind projects in Maryland and New York’s Long Island, and plans to submit a separate offshore wind projectfor an RFP by Massachusetts utilities for 400 MW of the resource. 

Tesla’s batteries have historically been linked to solar-plus-storage projects, but the company has since announced projects that would help store and dispatch intermittent wind energy during high peak periods. One such project is in Australia. 

The Deepwater/Tesla proposal isn’t the only project contending for the Massachusetts RFP contracts. Five companies announced bids under the RFP for transmission projects to ship renewable energy and hydropower from nearby states and Canada. Existing Massachusetts wind farms and solar projects were not eligible.

Projects will be chosen by Jan. 25 2018; contract negotiations are expected to be completed by March 27 and sent to regulators by April 25 for review. 

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Trina BESS, the battery energy storage company originally launched alongside Chinese PV giant Trina Solar but now run as an entity in its own right, sold 1,000 residential units in the first half of this year.

Previously operating under the name Trina Best and rebranded within the past year as Trina BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems), the energy storage company became a separate entity to Trina Solar at the end of 2015.

A Trina BESS representative emailed Energy-Storage.News today to reveal that TrinaHome, the company’s suite of battery energy storage solutions for households available in markets that include Europe, Australia and Japan, has been shipped to 1,000 customers in the first six months of 2017.

In Europe, the units are available in the single-phase S-Series and three-phase T-Series with capacities ranging from 3kWh up to 18kWh. In Australia, Trina has targeted the home market with Powercube 2.0, a device that is available in a ‘mini’ size (4.8kWh) or in 7.2kWh or 0.6kWh configurations. Meanwhile in Japan, two units, F6015A and F3015A, are on sale.

To put the sales figures in some context, the world’s leading residential energy storage market, Germany, has installed somewhere between around 50,000 and 60,000 small-scale energy storage systems to date, the vast majority for increasing self-consumption of PV-generated power. That market’s leading provider, Sonnen, claimed to have sold 2,600 units just in the first quarter of 2016, while Chinese inverter maker Growatt said it had sold around 3,000 units in the UK alone a couple of months ago.

Trina BESS general manager Frank Qi, who last year told Energy-Storage.News that Trina BESS could target an IPO by 2020, nonetheless hailed the sales figure as an achievement, expressing pride in his team and said the systems had received “positive market feedback”.

“We expect to gain 5% market shares in residential BESS market in this year globally,” Qi said.

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Alphabet’s secretive research lab X is developing a new way to store renewable energy that otherwise might be wasted — by using salt and antifreeze, reports Bloomberg. Researchers are developing a system that can be located anywhere, has the potential to last longer than lithium-ion batteries, and competes on price with new hydroelectric plants and other energy storage methods.

“If the moonshot factory gives up on a big, important problem like climate change, then maybe it will never get solved,” Obi Felten, a director at X told Bloomberg. “If we do start solving it, there are trillions and trillions of dollars in market opportunity.” The project is codenamed “Malta,” but it isn’t an official X project yet, so it doesn’t currently enjoy the benefits of a full-blown undertaking like Project Loon.v

The Malta team is currently working on an early test prototype in Silicon Valley. In renderings cited by Bloomberg, the system features four cylindrical tanks connected via pipes to a heat pump. Two are filled with salt, while the other two are filled with antifreeze or hydrocarbon liquid. The system takes in energy in the form of electricity, creating two streams of air: hot air that heats up the salt, and cold air that cools the antifreeze. A switch is then flipped which reverses the process: the hot and cold air “rush toward each other” which creates gusts powerful enough to spin a turbine to produce electricity when needed. Depending on how the tanks are insulated, the system can store energy for many hours or days. Thermal salt-based storage has the potential to be several times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries and other existing grid-scale storage technologies, Raj Apte, Malta’s head engineer, told Bloomberg.

Scientists have previously proven this system as a plausible technique in storing energy. Malta’s contribution has been to lower the operating temperature of the system so that materials like expensive ceramics and steels won’t be needed. A working system can vary in size from a “large garage” to a “full-scale traditional power plant.”

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