A team of researchers from the Naval Research Laboratory is on to a new zinc-based alternative to lithium-ion batteries. The new research aims at enabling the Navy to expands its energy storage options. The new zinc battery could also makes its way into the EV market, providing manufacturers with a lighter, less expensive alternative to today’s crop of lithium-ion batteries.

Head researcher Debra Rolison, who has been at NRL since 1980, graciously spent some time on the phone last week with CleanTechnica along with her colleague Jeffrey Long to provide some unique insights into the breakthrough.

The Navy’s problem with lithium-ion batteries is that they are not considered safe for some applications on ships as well as other facilities due to fire risks.

Don’t get the wrong idea about EV battery safety, though. Modern lithium-ion battery packs are designed with control systems that prevent overheating and provide for a longer lifespan.

Rolison underscored that you’re only going to get safety failure in a poorly designed control system — hoverboards being one notorious example. That kind of problem has practically zero chance of occurring in today’s intensely regulated auto market.

The safety issue does present an obstacle to designing lighter, less expensive energy storage systems, as Rolison explained:

“Lithium-ion thermal management has to be designed in. With other safeguards, these energy management systems add weight, volume, and cost.”

Rolison also noted that thermal management systems add complexity to the manufacturing end of things.

Throw in the additional supply chain complications and you can see why researchers have been pursuing an energy storage system that can safely ditch thermal management systems.

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Finnish technology group Wärtsilä has signed an agreement to acquire US energy storage company Greensmith Energy Management Systems.

The deal, which is still subject to US regulatory approvals, will allow Wärtsilä to expand its footprint in the energy storage market and position as a global energy systems integrator.

The transaction is expected to close no later than July.

Greensmith chief executive John Jung said: “The combination of Greensmith’s position and capability in energy storage technology with Wärtsilä’s global leadership in integrated energy solutions, with over 63GW of installed power plant capacity across 176 countries – will bring both market and technology synergies to both organizations.”

Greensmith’s projects include a partnership with Eon on two energy storage plants with a total volume of almost 20MW in Texas.

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In order to support its growth, the company is expanding in the country with new Supercharger stations and new stores.

The automaker announced yesterday that it opened three new stores and completed the expansion of Asia’s largest Supercharger station over the last week alone.

They wrote in a press release (translated from Chinese):

“In the fourth year since our introduction in China, Tesla continues to strengthen its commitment to investing and expanding the service network and facilities in order to allow more Chinese customers to join us and to experience intelligent, convenient and environmentally friendly pure electric mobility.”

One of the new stores they opened last week is located at the ‘Galaxy COCO Park’ in Shezhen:

It’s the fourth store in the Shezhen region. They are also adding 3 more Supercharger stations around the city.

A few days later, Tesla opened a store in Chengdu – the second store in the region:

Along with Shezhen and Chengdu, Tesla also opened a store in Shanghai’s Taikoo Hui district last week.

The new location is Tesla’s sixth in the city, which is the automaker’s biggest market in east China.

Finally, Tesla is also continuing its Supercharger expansion in the country.

Last month, the automaker announced a greater than anticipated expansion of its fast-charging network, which especially involves installing more charging stalls per station.

Tesla’s Supercharger stations had an average of 6 stalls per station and the biggest ones had between 8 and 12 stalls. A few had up to 20 stations, but now Tesla is planning stations with dozens of Superchargers – even some with between 50 and 100 stalls.

In China, they have 530 Superchargers at 110 different stations. Last week, Tesla expanded the Supercharger located in Beijing Huamao Center to 20 stalls – making it the largest in Asia.

It looks like China remains an important market for Tesla in the short-term, especially since the recent success that they have been having the country. In the long-term, it will likely involve local production, which has been rumored for years, and the introduction of the Model 3.

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Tesla has a new idea it calls aggregation and it is the next step in its plan to bring renewable energy to the utility grid. The first phase of that plan is the installation of Tesla Powerpack grid scale storage units at substations throughout the area served by a utility. The second phase is linking thousands of individual Powerwall residential battery systems to provide extra storage capacity.

In partnership with Green Mountain Power, Tesla is now offering GMP customers a Powerwall battery for the bargain price of $15 a month for 10 years, or a one time charge of $1500. The normal price of a the 10 kWh Powerwall with built-in inverter is $5,500, plus installation. Up to 2,000 batteries will be provided and they will be linked together via the internet so the utility company can use some of the power stored in them to balance the utility grid and provide extra power when needed while meeting all the needs of the homeowner.

The plan is similar to what is known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems that allow the batteries in electric cars to feed power back to the grid when they are plugged in but not charging. Electric car batteries can also be used to provide power to the home if wired properly.

Electricity is a curious thing. Despite the fact that it is the energy source of choice for industry, there is not one person alive who can tell you what it is. We can describe what it does, we know how to make it, we can send it long distances, but it remains one of those things, like gravity and light, that defy a complete physical explanation. What we do know is that is ephemeral. Once created, it must be used immediately or it is wasted.

Unless we can find a way to store it, that is. Thanks to its expertise in making batteries for electric cars, Tesla is at the forefront of battery storage systems. It is building the largest and most modern battery cell manufacturing facility in the world just outside of Reno, Nevada. Between the time when the company started building cars and now, it has quietly shifted from being an automaker that also makes batteries to a battery company that also makes cars.

Utility companies operate two kinds of generating plants. One is online constantly and takes care of so-called baseload needs. The other is called a peaker plant, a facility that is brought online when the demand for electricity increases temporarily. Peaker plants are typically used during the hours of 4 pm and 8 pm when demand is highest.

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In previous years, all eyes were on Europe as the leader in the Energy Transition. However, as progress has slowed in Germany and other nations, California re-emerging as a global leader. In 2016 the state met nearly a third of its electricity demand with renewable energy, including 20% with solar, wind, geothermal and other non-hydro resources.

On Saturday, California’s grid operator hit a new record, with renewable energy sources peaking at more than 2/3 of electric demand shortly before 3 PM. This follows on a week of strong wind and solar generation, with solar reaching a record output of 9.87 GW on on Thursday, followed by an all-time wind record of nearly 4.8 GW on Saturday.

Saturday May 13 did not hit a record for raw output in either solar or wind, but a combination of lower weekend demand and strong solar and wind production meant that total renewable energy generation excluding large hydro rose above 14 GW in during the afternoon, and shortly before 3 PM met 67% of all demand.

This included solar PV, which peaked at 8.7 GW ten minutes earlier, as well as concentrating solar power (CSP), which reached 494 MW around noon. The combination of these two resources and wind output pushed net power demand down to roughly 9 GW around 3 PM.

But as California reaches German levels of renewable energy penetrations it is also inheriting problems seen in Germany. Negative power prices are becoming increasingly common in the state, and according to an analysis by UtilityDive dipped below zero an average of twice daily in March.

And while negative prices are a problem for conventional generators, the state’s integration challenges are being felt by renewable energy as well. The state expects between 6 GW and 8 GW of curtailment this spring, largely due to huge volumes of hydro after an extremely wet winter.

Such curtailment was seen on May 13, and peaked at over 1.6 GW at 11 AM. There was still 800 MW of system-wide curtailment at 2 PM. This was mostly classified as “economic” curtailment, meaning that it was cheaper to curtail wind and solar than to switch off certain conventional generation.

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Clean energy has been on a roll.

Back in 2010, just three states received 10 percent or more of their electricity from non-hydro utility-scale renewables. Today, 17 states are members of the 10 Percent Club, with three states (Iowa, South Dakota and Kansas) leading the pack, with 30 percent or more of their electrons from utility-scale wind. Another three states exceed 20 percent non-hydro utility-scale renewables generation (Oklahoma, North Dakota and California). These leaders are politically diverse, with the top 10 states for renewable electricity generation five red states and five blue states.

As we highlight in this year’s U.S. Clean Tech Leadership Index, state and city leaders are playing an outsized role in the shift towards a cleaner energy mix. Last year, due to a range of economic and policy factors, wind and solar power represented 61 percent of all new electricity generating capacity installed in the U.S. (for the second year in a row).

There’s no doubt that declining costs have been a key driver fueling this rise. In many regions around the United States, utility-scale onshore wind and solar, even without subsidies, beat coal, nuclear and even combined-cycle natural gas on cost for new generation assets.

Another factor affecting the shift to renewables is supportive regional policies and regulations. In 2016, five states upped their renewable portfolio standard (RPS) targets to 25 percent or more; a sixth, Michigan, extended its RPS to 15 percent and a seventh, Ohio, reinstituted its RPS after having frozen it two years earlier. Five states (California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon and Vermont) have targets of 50 percent or greater and new policy innovations such as electric vehicle, community solar and energy storage incentives and mandates are further moving the proverbial needle.

Cities are flexing their clean-energy muscles, too. Five cities in the index are credited for their 100 percent community-wide renewable electricity commitments (Portland, Oregon; Salt Lake City; San Diego; San Francisco; and San Jose). Atlanta joined this elite group in May, too late to be included in this year’s index scoring.

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Solar module-level electronics rivals SolarEdge and Enphase reported their respective first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, allowing for a side-by-side comparison of their financial results.

Both of these firms were founded in roughly the same era and both tenaciously pioneered their respective module-level solutions. Both venture funded firms grew spectacularly and managed to reach the promised land of an initial public offering.

That’s where the companies’ respective performances seem to diverge. Both firms grew fast, along with the exploding residential solar market, but SolarEdge has been more inclined to make a consistent profit at a sustainable margin while showing growth and accurately meeting or exceeding guidance. Enphase has struggled to cut costs and keep up with the price declines across the residential solar supply stack — resulting in very slim margins and consistent quarterly losses.

Stripping away the aspirational CEO rhetoric, here are the earnings numbers and their brutal truth.

AES Energy Storage has been deploying utility-scale energy storage into electric grids for nearly a decade and recently built both the single largest lithium-ion energy storage array in the world, a 30MW array in Escondido, California, and a second smaller array totalling 7.5MW in El Cajon, in just six months.

In his upcoming presentation Lessons Learned from the Rapid Deployment of the Largest Energy Storage Array to Solve Grid Reliability in Southern California, which will take place at the Australian Energy Storage Conference running June 14-15 at the International Convention Centre Sydney, Leslie will explore the knowledge gained over the course of this landmark project and how Australian energy storage stakeholders can employ it in an Australian context.

According to Leslie, a long-term view to create a sustainable market for energy storage, as opposed to “boom and bust”, will be key to the success of Australia’s energy market transition.

“Some of the markets outside of Australia began with strong forethought and good intentions,” Leslie says.

“However, sometimes as markets evolve, market strategists secure short-term gains but don’t think about long-term market stability and reliability. The parties driving Australia’s transformation to a cleaner, affordable and reliable future should seek to learn from other markets’ choices and outcomes.”

Leslie believes that successfully transforming the market within Australia will require energy storage to be part of the main planning toolkit for all generation, transmission and distribution sectors. Additionally, Australia will need to modify market mechanisms to deliver longer-term pricing signals to encourage high-quality, long-term infrastructure investment, such as energy storage.

“Australia and the NEM are at a critical juncture where strategy, direction and policies can help drive grid-scale energy storage adoption and enable the NEM to be the global model other markets follow,” he says.

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Almost a year into his new research partnership with Tesla, battery researcher Jeff Dahn has been hitting the talk circuit presenting some of his team’s recent progress. We reported last week on his talk at the International Battery Seminar from March and now we have a talk from him at MIT this week.

He went into details about why Tesla decided to work with his team and hire one of his graduate students, but he also announced that they have developed cells that can double the lifetime of the batteries in Tesla’s products – 4 years ahead of schedule.

Update: Dahn reached out to clarify that the cells in question were tested in the lab and they are not in Tesla’s products yet.

During the talk titled “Why would Tesla Motors partner with some Canadian?” – embedded below, Dahn explained how they invented a way to test battery cells in order to accurately monitor them during charging and discharging to identify causes for degradation.

Like he admitted in his talk at the International Battery Seminar in March, Dahn doesn’t claim that he understands perfectly the chemistry behind the degradation, but the machines that they developed enabled them to test new chemistries more accurately and much faster – resulting in significant discoveries for the longevity of the cells.

One of his students working on the project went on to work for Tesla’s in-house battery cell research group and another started a company to commercialize the battery cell testing machines that they developed. Their client list includes Tesla, but also Apple, GM, 24M, and plenty of other large battery manufacturers and consumers.

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Tesla is now expanding its energy storage business from simply supplying the battery systems, to also remote control of installed storage systems to make the grid cleaner and more efficient.

Tesla calls it aggregation – the next step in energy storage.

The idea is to enable Powerwall owners to give utilities access to the battery – for use when energy demand is at its highest.  Naturally, in turn owners would gain compensation for the extra capacity.

The first Tesla partner with the project is Green Mountain Power in Vermont.

Tesla and Green Mountain Power are excited to announce a program where you can get a Powerwall to back up your home with reliable energy for only $15/month.

Green Mountain Power intends to deploy 2,000 Powerwalls for $15/month or a $1,500 one-time fee.

In some ways, it’s similar to renting autonomous car, as Tesla would also build a platform joining those who have product, with those who are in need of using a product.

Learn more about the program here.

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