Despite slight slowing in commercial and industrial installations due to COVID-19, the U.S. energy storage industry saw record-breaking deployments during the second quarter of 2020, and rapid expansion is expected to continue in the months to come.

The industry deployed 168 MW of storage during the second quarter, a 72% increase over the first quarter of 2020 and a 117% increase year-over-year. The industry’s quarterly record, set in Q4 2019, is 186.4 MW, according to the U.S. Energy Storage Monitor released Sept. 3 by the U.S Energy Storage Association and Wood Mackenzie.

Although the numbers are not yet final, the industry already expects to post more records before the year is done, according to Dan Finn-Foley, head of energy storage at Wood Mackenzie.

“We already know that Q3 will be a big quarter,” he said. “Based on what we’re seeing now, it would be surprising if Q3 is not a big increase over Q2.”

Energy storage is still a small enough market that a single large installation can give a significant boost to the larger industry, Finn-Foley said, and several large systems are expected to come online toward the end of 2020.

A single large utility-scale deployment in California accounted for more than two-thirds of the total front-of-meter deployment during the second quarter of this year, but Finn-Foley said the bulk of this past quarter’s activity came from residential markets.

“Desire for resilience in California is growing,” Finn-Foley said, “and in Hawaii, pretty much everyone is getting storage to go with solar.”

Those two states, Finn-Foley said, accounted for 80% of residential deployments. Government incentives continue to drive demand for residential installations, he added.

Utility-scale installations are more geographically dispersed, and in the coming months and years, this segment is expected to drive the greatest growth for energy storage, Finn-Foley said.

Engineers from the University of Newcastle have come up with a surprisingly simple new energy storage system, built around blocks that store thermal energy like melted chocolate chips in a muffin. The team says they’re efficient, scalable, safe, inexpensive, and can be used in existing coal-fired power plants.

Renewable energy is a key component of any plan to reduce our impact on the planet, but storage remains a major hurdle to making these systems viable. Recent solutions include Tesla’s huge lithium-ion batteries, or storing energy in unconventional forms like molten salt or silicon, heavy rail cars on steep inclines, and huge blocks suspended in mineshafts or stacked in towers.

And now the list has a new entry – Miscibility Gaps Alloy (MGA) blocks. Measuring just 30 x 20 x 16 cm (11.8 x 7.9 x 6.3 in), these bricks are made of materials with high thermal conductivity, so they can easily be heated up to store energy and cooled to release it again as needed.

To do this effectively, the blocks are made of two main components. There’s a solid matrix that holds it all together in the brick shape, and embedded throughout that are particles that melt. The team describes the design as similar to a chocolate chip muffin.

“Imagine the matrix is the cake component, which holds everything in shape when heated and rapidly distributes that heat,” says Mark Copus, an engineer on the project. “The other particles, represented by the choc chips, melt and store thermal energy through the solid to liquid change phase.”

The idea is that these MGA blocks could be heated up using excess energy from renewable sources during peak output times, and store it for when demand spikes. Or they could be stacked up inside other power plants, to help recycle waste heat back into the system.

From the University of Oxford’s Battery Intelligence Lab

The University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science is world-leading and covers the entire spectrum of engineering disciplines, from traditional engineering like turbines or heat flow to cutting-edge topics like machine learning. Our research group at the Department is the Battery Intelligence Lab, and as you can infer from the name, we research batteries and specifically lithium-ion batteries. We understand how they work, their efficiencies in terms of thermal behaviour, degradation and all these other things. That’s important because these details are really hidden and the investors and developers building and operating these batteries don’t necessarily have that level of insight into how high-level decisions will impact individual cells.

Creating a digital twin: How and why

My role within Energy Superhub Oxford is to create a digital twin of the grid battery. This is basically a model of the physical asset which can simulate every individual component inside the battery and how they work together. A lot of physical assets are black boxes. When you buy an asset the manufacturer provides a data sheet on how you should use it and what you should expect from it.

For instance, a battery will tell you how often it can be charged or discharged at certain power levels, and what efficiencies and behaviour you can expect. It’s a very high-level overview when what you actually have is a field full of containers of tens of thousands of cells.

The digital twin allows you to understand how everything works together, and more importantly to test different scenarios. If you have an asset which is worth tens of millions of pounds, you don’t want to do something in the real world unless you’re certain it will work, because it’s quite expensive if you make a mistake!

The ongoing heatwave in California has caused rolling blackouts that some have blamed on renewable energy, which is hard to regulate without an adequate battery backup. And, like manna from heaven, now the world’s largest battery backup facility is up and running in San Diego.

The facility stores up to 230 megawatts of power with plans to expand up to 250, both dwarfing and setting a new challenge for similar Tesla facilities in rural Australia and others around the world.

Why has the heatwave stretched the California grid to this extent? Anytime there’s a heatwave, people turn up their air conditioners, which are among the most energy-intensive appliances on the market. When the heat is enough to constitute a health hazard, it’s hard to argue that civilians should turn off the AC—especially when people can’t comfortably gather to share resources because of the COVID-19 pandemic and closures. Think of everyone who might normally spend the afternoon at a movie theater on the hottest days of the year.

Instead, people in individual homes are cranking up the AC to match the hazardous heat. That creates an over-demand on the grid, and to compensate, electrical suppliers often plan rolling blackouts to ensure the deprivation of services is, at least, uniform. This is where a battery backup comes in.

The “peak hours” for power usage in the summer coincide with the hottest, most dangerous part of days that have already been record high temperatures. A battery facility stores energy during off-peak times and releases it back into the grid during peak times.

Some solar customers already have their own small version of this, where their panels “sell” energy back into the grid at peak times in order to offset their energy bills. In California, so many people and facilities use solar power that the peak hours don’t start until the sun goes down, because that’s when demand shifts back to the state’s traditional power plants.

Major PV inverter manufacturer Sungrow has reported a significant recovery in revenue and profitability in the second quarter of 2020, after financial figures suffered in the first quarter, due to the impact of COVID-19 on both its PV project and EPC business and demand for PV inverters in China.

Major PV inverter manufacturer Sungrow has reported a significant recovery in revenue and profitability in the second quarter of 2020, after financial figures suffered in the first quarter, due to the impact of COVID-19 on both its PV project and EPC business and demand for PV inverters in China.

Sungrow’s total operating income (revenue) in the first quarter of 2020 fell to RMB 1,846 million (US$ 269.8 million), compared to record revenue of around US$850.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. Net profit had followed the same downward path, resulting in figures of US$23.3 million in the first quarter of 2020, compared to a net profit of US$49.4 million in the previous quarter.

However, the second quarter of 2020 marked a complete turnaround with revenue reaching RMB 5,095 million (US$744.67 million), Sungrow’s second highest quarterly figures. Net profit was RMB 286.62 million (US$41.88 million).

As a result, first half year revenue reached RMB 6,942 million (US$1,01 billion), a 55.57% increase over the prior year period, Net profit in the reporting period was RMB 446,13 million (US$65.2 million) 71.95% increase, year-on-year.

Key to the rebound was the growth in PV inverter sales within its PV Inverter & Power Conversion business segment, which reached around RMB 2,669 million (US$390.12 million) in the first half of 2020, compared to around US$243.3 million in the prior year period, a 60% increase, year-on-year.

Overall sales in the reporting quarter were also boosted by its energy storage segment, which was claimed to have increased sales to around US$35.6 million, up almost 50% from the prior year period, according to the company.

BOSTON, Sept. 3, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The electricity grid is undergoing its first evolution since the invention of the power transmission system, and energy storage devices, particularly mechanical energy storage devices, will play a solid role in this evolution.

Decarbonization, renewable energies, and energy storage devices are all factors involved in the current evolution of the electricity grid. In the last decades the integration of renewable energies, pushed by the necessity to decarbonize the electricity sector, led energy storage devices to become increasingly important to stabilize the electricity grid.

The increased adoption of variable renewable energy led the electricity grid operator to adopt energy storage systems to smoothen the variability of renewable sources.

Li-ion batteries, currently dominating the storage sectors in all of its aspects. From portable electronics to MW scale storage systems, Li-ion batteries will struggle in the future to address the MW scale power and daily storage duration, when Mechanical Energy Storage systems will enter the market.

In the brand-new report “Potential Stationary Energy Storage Technologies to Monitor,” IDTechEx has investigated these emerging technologies. With a simple working mechanism, Mechanical Energy Storage systems are addressing the bigger spectrum of the energy storage devices: large power output, and long storage time.

This new class of storage systems include older and newer technologies. It includes elderly technologies like compressed air energy storage, already installed in the 1980s, and some of the younger gravitational energy storage, like in the case of Highview Energy, and Energy Vault recently backed with millions of dollars.

These interesting devices are now entering the electricity market with demonstration projects, to prove the technical concept. The constant integration of variable energy sources will require additional storage devices to stabilize the electricity grid, where the Mechanical Energy Storage device could play a fundamental role.

The US industry deployed 168MW / 288MWh of energy storage in the second quarter of this year, the second highest quarterly figures on record, according to Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables.

The market research and analysis firm has just issued its latest quarterly US Energy Storage Monitor, produced in cooperation with the national Energy Storage Association industry group. The figures are up on Q1 2020’s 98MW / 208MWh of installations and are second only to the record-breaking final quarter of 2019, when 186.4MW / 364MWh of deployments were made.

Wood Mackenzie noted that one single grid-scale project in California made up two-thirds of the total deployments for the quarter: the state is leader in all three segments of the US market, from front-of-meter (62.5MWh in Q2), residential (66.1MWh) to non-residential including commercial and industrial behind-the-meter (32.1MWh).

Other states to lead the market segments included Hawaii (26.2MWh residential and 15MWh non-residential), Massachusetts (23.7MWh non-residential and 14MWh front-of-meter), Oklahoma (20MWh front-of-meter) and Arizona (3.5MWh residential).

Firm revises annual deployment forecast downward slightly
While Wood Mackenzie had earlier in the year issued a forecast for the annual market to total 7.2GW in size and US$7.2 billion in monetary terms by 2025 in the US, the latest Monitor predicts that US deployments will reach “nearly 7GW” annually by 2025, worth about US$6.9 billion.

Nonetheless the growth forecast is still a significant jump from the 1.2GW of expected installations in 2020, which the analysis firm pointed out still meant the market crossed the US$1 billion threshold despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts.

Finnish technology group Wärtsilä has secured an engineering, procurement, and construction contract from Duke Energy for three battery storage facilities in the US.

In North Carolina, Duke Energy’s Asheville (8.8MW) and Hot Springs (4MW/4MWh) facilities will receive battery storage facilities under the contract. These are part of the company’s $2bn grid modernisation programme in western North Carolina.

The third energy storage facility is Duke Energy’s Crane project, located in Indiana. All three storage project sites are expected to be commissioned during 2020 and 2021.

A Wärtsilä spokesperson said the company would use its GEMS energy management platform in the projects. It will also use the software for planned battery sites and solar assets across six energy distribution areas.
The company said this will enable North Carolina facilities to dispatch energy, provide emergency backup power and balance the local grid.

Wärtsilä energy storage and optimisation vice-president Andrew Tang said: “Duke Energy is specifically utilising the GEMS Fleet Director and GEMS Power Plant Controller to monitor, assess and optimize deployments across multiple regions in real-time and integrating GEMS as a data source for their specialised algorithms and analytics.

“GEMS will be customised for Duke Energy’s deployments to increase grid resilience at sites that require energy storage backup and to ultimately facilitate the first-ever entry into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator market.”