Eos is the first company to accept orders below $100 per usable kWh for a complete DC battery system including battery modules, battery management system, and outdoor-rated enclosure. The company’s price-cap guarantee ensures that future purchases will receive the lower contracted price or any future price for an equivalent volume purchased the same year. It is also offering up to 20-year performance guarantees at additional cost to optimise capacity under a wide range of applications and use cases.

“These price points correspond to a levelised cost of energy of approximately $50-60 per MWh for storage, roughly 30 percent lower than the lowest projected cost for any competing storage system” said Jim Hughes, Eos Chairman of the Board. “With these economics, Eos will become the default solution for new peaking capacity and will enable a dispatchable renewable energy product that outcompetes conventional power generation.”

The Eos Aurora is a best-fit utility-grade solution for multi-hour, high-throughput applications such as locational capacity, peak shaving, and renewable integration. integrates the company’s proprietary zinc hybrid cathode Znyth battery into an outdoor-rated, plug-and-play Energy Stack that enables rapid installation and reduces cost throughout the project lifecycle. According to Eos CEO Michael Oster, the company’s approach is aimed at providing a significant and sustainable cost advantage over lithium ion while delivering a battery that is inherently safer, longer life, lower maintenance, and more tolerant of extreme operating conditions.

The Eos Aurora has no moving parts and employs widely available materials and highly commoditised manufacturing equipment and processes. Eos recently announced a manufacturing and assembly partnership with NY-based Environment One Corporation (E/One). The two companies will be moving production to a dedicated facility in upstate New York, creating 80 high-tech jobs as the companies reach a production rate of 400 MWh per year in 2017. 

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Edison International’s utility unit said it has completed the first-of-its kind battery storage and natural gas power systems in Southern California that will help the region backstop increasing amounts of renewable energy and cope with potential shortages after a historic gas leak.

Southern California Edison, General Electric Co. and Wellhead Power Solutions partnered to install 10-megawatt lithium-ion batteries at two of the utility’s gas generators, Rosemead, California-based Edison said Monday in a statement. The plants are designed to fire up during periods of peak demand. The batteries, which can provide instant power while gas turbines ramp up, are expected to reduce fuel use and lead to emission reductions of at least 60 percent, Edison said.

“The new system will help SCE better utilize the resources on the grid, provide enhanced reliability, reduce environmental impact, and reduce cost for our operations and for our customers,” Southern California Edison President Ron Nichols said in an emailed statement.

The installation comes after a months-long leak crippled the state’s largest natural gas storage field near Los Angeles, raising concerns about potential energy shortages. In addition, the state has mandated that utilities get half of their power from renewable sources by 2030. Batteries have been viewed as helping accommodate more green energy by helping utilities manage the unpredictable output from wind and solar farms.

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SAN DIEGO, April 19, 2017 – Today, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) announced that it has signed contracts for five new local battery storage facilities for a total of 83.5 megawatts (MW).  These four-hour energy storage facilities would be like having batteries from more than 5,500 all-electric, long-range vehicles at the ready. In addition, the company signed a contract to add a 4.5 MW demand response program. SDG&E has submitted all six contracts to the California Public Utilities Commission for approval.

If approved, two of the five lithium-ion battery energy storage facilities will be owned and operated by SDG&E to enhance regional energy reliability while maximizing renewable energy use. AES Energy Storage will construct a 40-MW storage facility, building on its successful 37.5 MWs of deployments in Escondido and El Cajon. A 30-MW facility will be built in Miramar by Renewable Energy Systems Americas Inc. (RES). The other storage projects totaling 13.5 MW will be owned by third parties including Powin Energy, Enel through its U.S. subsidiary Enel Green Power North America, and Advanced Microgrid Solutions and constructed in Escondido, Poway and San Juan Capistrano.

“These projects will add more flexibility to the system and help us to ensure reliability while providing greater levels of clean energy to all of our local communities,” said Emily Shults, SDG&E’s vice president of energy procurement. “By building these projects, SDG&E will remain at the forefront of helping the state achieve its bold clean-energy and carbon-emission targets.”

All five of the battery projects can store supplies of solar, wind and other traditional sources and release it when energy is in high demand.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has set targets for investor-owned utilities to procure large amounts of energy storage by 2020, including 165 MW by SDG&E.  With these five new projects, SDG&E is on track to meet this goal. The new facilities are expected to come on line between December 2019 and late 2021.

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About three years ago inside a sprawling factory southeast of Pittsburgh, a promising battery startup was churning out some of the first of its ultra-simple, nontoxic, low-cost batteries made from a combination of salt water, carbon and manganese oxide.

With $180 million in funding from some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names, including billionaire Bill Gates, it looked like the batteries could be some of the first with an alternative type of chemistry to provide low-cost storage for the power grid, buildings, remote machinery and clean energy farms.

But that vision didn’t quite pan out. Just a couple of months ago, the battery maker, Aquion Energy, filed for bankruptcy protection, laid off almost all of its workers and ceased selling its stackable energy storage devices. As the company looks for a buyer, it’s also been hit with a lawsuit from former workers who say they were let go without proper notice, and it has been the target of critics who question why the firm was still struggling after receiving state and federal support.

It’s a familiar tale for battery industry watchers. From big companies like A123 Systems, to smaller ones like EnerVault and Imergy, companies developing new types of battery chemistries have faced difficult markets, major technical hurdles, and long sales cycles.

In recent years, however, the dramatically dropping cost of lithium-ion batteries has become chief among the concerns. While some predicted these batteries would become cheaper over time, most didn’t estimate that the prices would go so low so fast — making the outlook for alternative battery chemistries a lot murkier.

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Drawing inspiration from the plant world, researchers have invented a new electrode that could boost our current solar energy storage by an astonishing 3,000 percent.

The technology is flexible and can be attached directly to solar cells – which means we could finally be one step closer to smartphones and laptops that draw their power from the Sun, and never run out. 

A major problem with reliably using solar energy as a power source is finding an efficient way to store it for later use without leakage over time.

For that purpose, engineers have been turning to supercapacitors – a type of technology that can charge extremely fast and release energy in large bursts. But for now, supercapacitors aren’t able to store enough energy to make them viable as solar batteries.

So a team from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia decided to investigate how living organisms manage to cram a lot of energy into a small space, and their imagination was soon spurred on by the ingenious fractal-based leaves of a common North American plant – the western swordfern (Polystichum munitum).

“The leaves of the western swordfern are densely crammed with veins, making them extremely efficient for storing energy and transporting water around the plant,” says one of the team, nanoengineer Min Gu.

“Our electrode is based on these fractal shapes – which are self-replicating, like the mini structures within snowflakes – and we’ve used this naturally-efficient design to improve solar energy storage at a nano level.”

In the image below, the surface of a fern leaf is magnified 400 times, and you can clearly see the self-replicating pattern that researchers used in their design:

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Answering the call for increasing energy self-reliance, a grassroots electricity-sharing model is emerging. “Community microgrids,” comprising community-owned or subscribed solar PV and other renewable energy sources, offer participants and surrounding consumers the security of energy resilience in times of grid failure and protection from energy price increases driven by volatile energy markets. They also give energy producers/consumers (aka “prosumers”) more control over the renewable energy they generate.

One of the most intriguing of such projects in the U.S. is LO3’s Brooklyn Microgrid (BMG), where residents with rooftop solar PV sell their excess energy to their neighbors, instead of relying on net metering to sell it back to their utility, ConEdison. Although the law prohibits energy consumers from selling energy to one another, BMG members are able to execute these peer-to-peer energy transactions using credits in a blockchain ledger. Every BMG prosumer connects to the microgrid through a dual-purpose meter called a TransActive Grid Element (TAG-e). The TAG-e both measures the participant’s energy production and consumption and communicates with other TAG-e devices to record transactions in the blockchain.

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Silicon Valley energy-storage provider, Adara Power, recently launched its second-generation storage system, the Adara Pulse. The Adara Pulse is an intelligent, stackable to 20-kWh energy storage solution driven by Adara’s iC3 Smart Controls technology.

The Adara Pulse supports AC coupling for off-grid and grid-tied applications. It tightly integrates all elements of the energy-storage system with a modular hardware and software approach, enabling the components to be stocked globally and eliminating the added cost of shipping bulky material to a central manufacturing site and expensive and unnecessary secondary enclosures.

The Adara iC3 Smart Controls with cellular connectivity feature out-of-the-box communication between lithium-ion batteries, Schneider inverters, and a Cloud-based software platform. The solution minimizes field programming and provides remote programmability.

The Adara Pulse can be ordered now to take advantage of the California Self Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), a ratepayer-funded rebate program available to customers of the major California investor-owned utilities (PG&E, SCE, LADWP, & SDGE). The Adara Pulse will be scheduled for nationwide delivery and installation during the third quarter of 2017.

“The energy storage market is at an inflection point. Energy density and performance of cells have improved and prices now support broad adoption. The Adara Pulse is perfectly aligned with today’s market realities,” said Neil Maguire, CEO of Adara Power.

It can be installed with a new solar installation or retrofitted with an existing system. Adara’s peak-shifting and self-consumption, non-export algorithms ensure compliance with the Federal Investment Tax Credit and adaptability for a wide range of energy storage use cases.

This advanced technology minimizes a homeowner’s electricity bill in regions subject to Time of Use (TOU) rates and support new net metering programs such as California’s NEM 2.0. And unlike many other energy storage systems currently available, the Adara Pulse has a UPS mode utilizing an 8 millisecond internal automatic transfer switch to keep house loads powered when the grid goes down for maximum back-up power.

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When Eli Harris co-founded EcoFlow Tech, his goal was to produce a green and mobile energy storage system that could serve as a mobile power station for consumers needing more than a phone charge.

“I wanted to take an industrial amount of power and put it in the consumer market,” said the co-founder and CEO of the company. “There were no portable batteries sized for consumers—only products like the fixed Tesla wall and the small batteries for phones.”

His idea was to put in the hands of consumers a portable battery system that could be paired with solar and used to power lights, camping equipment, small heaters, laptops, power tools, small refrigerators and many other consumer products for customers in the US and abroad.

Working with experienced battery engineers and with $10 million in backing from two of China’s leading supply chain and manufacturing companies, Harris and his associates developed River, a “personal grid” or mobile power station with a 412-watt capacity, the ability to charge 11 devices simultaneously, and a real-time power display. Ecoflow released the product earlier this week on Indiegogo and as of Thursday, had attracted more than $157,000 from 267 backers—523 percent more funding than its goal of $30,000 on Indiegogo.

“We broke $100K in six hours; less than 0.1% of campaigns in history have broken $100K in the first 24 hours and less than 1% of campaigns break $100K total,” said Harris. “It’s an exciting validation of the market demand for River and the new concept of personal energy storage.”

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San Jose, California, April 17th, 2017: TrinaBESS announced today that the company will introduce its large-scale Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) called TrinaMega for the US Market at the 27th Annual Energy Storage Association (ESA) Expo, held in Denver on April 18^th – 20^th.

TrinaMega is a modular plug-and-play containerized BESS solution, entirely custom-made, in order to answer specific battery usage and functions from utilities and large energy users. TrinaMega provides one of the best battery densities on the market for utility-scale projects, up to 2.9 MWh per containerized BESS. Each TrinaMega is scalable, and includes the complete BESS system, UPS, SCADA unit, thermal management, fire suppressant, power supply and auxiliary systems. TrinaMega is designed, manufactured and tested in full compliance with the latest edition of IEC, EN and UL standards, and provides one of the most optimized safety, control and monitoring systems.

“With more than 100 engineers, TrinaBESS designs each TrinaMega to fit specific battery needs for each projects in the United States, from resource adequacy, spinning reserves, frequency regulation, sub-second demand response, non-export, to power back up.” said Anne Torricelli, Director, Energy Storage Solutions, North America. “With the expansion of TrinaBESS in North America, we adapted the design of a modular solution that can meet the increasing demand for energy storage in the USA while providing local support directly from California.”

“Because of the high efficiency and excellent reliability of our TrinaBESS products, TrinaMega has been successfully developed in the UK and Africa markets. Some of the latest TrinaMega installations include a Triad and Frequency Regulation project in the UK and micro-grid energy storage projects in Africa and island countries in Indian ocean and pacific.” said Frank Qi, General Manager of TrinaBESS. “USA is the largest Energy Storage market in the world, and one of most important markets for TrinaBESS. With project references in Europe, Africa, Australia and Japan, TrinaBESS also continues its international expansion with local offices in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Sydney and Singapore.”

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