Oregon has become the latest US state to lay out its foundations for electricity companies to procure and deploy energy storage systems, with the state Public Utility Commission (PUC) providing guidelines and timelines.

The state actually enacted bill HB2193, which would authorise utilities to explore the possibilities of deploying energy storage for reasons including deferring spending on transmission infrastructure, back in 2015. The latest document to emerge from the PUC gives details on how it sees that electric companies with over 25,000 retail customers could select storage system providers and present project proposals to the commission. Once approved, they have been given until 2020 to procure projects.

This would apply to two utilities, Pacificorp, trading as Pacific Power, and Portland General Electric Company (PGE). While the systems should have over 5MWh storage capacity each, they would also be capped at 1% of the utility’s peak load in 2014, except, the PUC said, for a project of “statewide significance”. Utilities will be allowed to recover the costs of projects from ratepayers.

GTM Research’s recent report on third quarter 2016 activity in energy storage in the US highlighted policy moves to spur on energy storage development in Oregon and in Massachusetts as two of the states following national leaders California and New York’s lead in recognising the value of energy storage. Massachusetts has determined that it will implement procurement targets for storage, although it has yet to rule on their size or timescale.

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In the new world of energy, the supply of electricity from renewable sources fluctuates dramatically. A balance can be achieved by storing the energy to decouple the moment of power generation from the moment of consumption. Electrical energy storage also provides greater stability in transmission and distribution grids, and greater security for the energy system as a whole.

Electrical energy storage can be used in industrial plants, craft businesses, private homes, and electric and hybrid vehicles. The systems in commercial use today can be broadly categorised as mechanical, electrical, chemical, electrochemical, and thermal. There are technologies suitable for large-scale storage, and others for smaller-scale applications. Siemens is working to develop solutions for many different storage technologies and systems. Obviously, all these forms of storage have their pros and cons.

Decision makers must carefully ponder the merits of each alternative in light of the particular use case. We’ve summarised the options and some of their main characteristics.

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China’s deployment of energy storage looks set to continue an upward trajectory, with almost 600MW in the pipeline as of the third quarter this year.

According to figures released by the China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA), 14 new projects were announced in Q3 2016 totalling 587MW. This includes projects that are in planning stages, under construction and that have gone online in the quarter. This appears to represent a significant boost to the sector, and is a vast 586% increase on the same period of last year. Up until the beginning of the quarter, CNESA found, 170.6MW of energy storage was in operation in the country.  

The bulk of this large figure is contributed by a single project, a touted 400MW supercapacitor storage station with storage duration of four hours in Guazhou County, in the northern Gansu province, a couple of hundred kilometres south of the border with Mongolia. This project will be used to demonstrate the use of storage in preventing wind power capacity curtailment on a microgrid. The project, by Shidai Jiahua Co, requires US$680 million in investment and has an expected payback time of 16 to 18 years.

There was also a 160MW local government project in Inner Mongolia, another microgrid to be used for renewables integration. The local authority of Xilin Gol, one of Inner Mongolia’s 12 sub-divided regions, is keen to trial retail sales of electricity from independent suppliers and this project represents a major step forward in this regard.

While these two huge projects are in northwestern regions of China, Jiangsu in the east will get some significant new projects including a 1.5MW/12MWh project from partners including battery maker Narada Power, inverter maker Sungrow and project developer GCL Power, which is an arm of one of China’s biggest PV groups, GCL Poly. Narada Power was also involved in a 15MW/120MWh project in Jiangsu’s Wuxi City Xingzhou Industrial Park.

Overall, renewables integration appears to be the biggest application driver for energy storage in China, as seen in the diagram below. While big announcements were plentiful, only 1.5MW of storage actually came online in Q3, which was nonetheless a 50% increase on the same period of 2015.

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Software for energy storage systems will be a mixture of in-house solutions by integrator/developers and third-party providers, in an industry segment set for a steep rise in value, according to one expert.

A new report from Navigant Research has predicted a steep rise in the value of energy storage software. Navigant analyst Alex Eller told Energy-Storage.News that cumulative vendor revenues will rocket from US$201.2 million this year to US$3.4 billion by 2025. The report itself looks at both utility-scale and behind-the-meter energy storage software, including residential, commercial and industrial (C&I) and large-scale, from a range of providers with a range of approaches.

Software is a vital piece of the advanced energy storage puzzle, used in three key areas: analysing projects, controlling and operating storage systems, and system optimisation. As Eller points out, software determines how effectively the storage will achieve revenues or savings, whether that be in helping C&I customers reduce demand charges on their bills or providing multiple or ‘stacked’ services to grid operators.

While on the one hand the right software can effectively manage and control systems, it also plays its role even before systems are built.

“Usually a lot of the same vendors that have management systems platforms also do system design and analysis,” Eller said.

“So before anything even gets built they can model how components are going to interact, the optimal size for the system and all different operating parameters that are going to allow streamlined installation, make the whole process faster and more accurate, you’re not going to have systems that are oversized or undersized, theoretically that’s the idea there.”

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U.S. energy producers of all kinds see reasons for optimism as they start 2017, though the incoming Trump administration may spell trouble for some of a greener hue.

Among oil drillers, a recent uptick in prices suggests an end to a slump that has persisted since mid-2014, while natural gas, solar and wind energy companies aim to build on their gains in U.S. electric power markets in 2016.

Even the struggling nuclear sector can point to victories in New York and Illinois, where unprofitable reactors were saved by state actions last year.

That said, here’s a list of some of the most notable energy developments for the U.S. in 2016 — ones that may set the stage for how Americans produce and use energy in 2017.

The re-emergence of OPEC

For the first time since 2008, OPEC agreed to cut its oil output in a bid to boost prices and recover some market control. Saudi Arabia and other cartel members were joined by Russia and other non-OPEC nations in agreeing to curtail production by nearly 1.8 million barrels a day in 2017. It’s still too early to say whether the deal will stick, though Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, was up by 12% on Friday from   Nov. 30, when OPEC met. Not bound by the deal are U.S. producers, whose output could jump thanks to higher prices.

Trump promises energy shakeup

Donald Trump’s surprise election will mean a significant shift in U.S. energy policy. The president-elect has promised to promote oil, natural gas and coal aggressively, and pull back on Obama administration commitments to fighting climate change. The men he has chosen to head the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department, not to mention the State Department, indicate he intends to follow through on those commitments.

Temperatures up, carbon emissions flat

The year 2016 is likely to be the hottest on record, surpassing record highs set in 2015 and 2014. This comes as the 2015 Paris climate agreement, signed by the U.S. and nearly 200 other nations to avoid a catastrophic increase in temperatures, took effect. Still, carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are likely to rise only slightly globally in 2016 and fall a bit in the U.S., thanks considerably to reductions in coal use, the Global Carbon Project reports.

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Climatescope, a new report from BNEF, was released last week, and while many news outlets highlighted the finding that solar is now cheaper than wind, the report contains numbers that signal another major shift in renewable energy.

The report focuses on “clean energy market conditions and opportunities in 58 emerging nations in South America, Africa, the Mideast, and Asia” and contrasts the progress of these poorer nations against the achievements of the OECD countries — the wealthier nations of the world that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development.

And for the first time, the developing nations are winning.

The center of the clean energy universe has shifted from north to south

The 58 emerging-market economies aggregated in the Climatescope report set a record for clean energy deployed in 2015 with 70 gigawatts built, compared to the 59 gigawatts of clean power deployed in the 35 wealthier OECD countries. Cumulatively, the developing nations have won $154.1 billion in cleantech investment and added more clean energy capacity, with faster growth rates than the OECD nations using both those metrics. 

According to the report, 80 percent of the developing nations studied now have national clean energy targets, while three in four have set CO2 emissions reduction goals.

China played a big part in this, but “less-developed nations also played a role.”

There is a downside to record rates of renewables being added to existing grids, and that’s integration challenges. The report notes that some nations have built wind or solar projects despite not having the “associated transmission to deliver power” along with “grid operators [prioritizing] delivery” of power from fossil-fuel plants over those from renewable sources.

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