Walmart is moving toward 100% renewable energy. The retail giant does not have a time frame for that target, but says it already derives 25% of its global electricity needs come from renewable sources. That said, Walmart has also starting eyeing energy storage as a prime investment to help smooth the intermittence of renewable energy. Right now, the retail giant has 17 energy storage projects in California, including six 200 kW, 400 kWh solar-tied batteries. 

“Walmart is actively evaluating different energy storage technologies that have the potential to reduce our operating costs and improve stores’ resilience during power outages and extreme weather events across our portfolio,” Mark Vanderhelm, vice president of energy for Walmart, said in a statement.

Axiom Exergy, on the hand, is carving out a niche in the energy storage sector by targeting supermarkets, making it a good fit for a company like Walmart. Supermarkets have thin margins, making cost savings an important contributor to profitability.

Axiom says its refrigeration battery can reduce on-peak electricity demand at the Walmart store by up to 40%. It also has the potential to reduce refrigeration related operating costs and improve resilience across stores. Refrigeration can represent up to 55% of the average supermarket’s electricity consumption.

Click Here to Read Full Article

New York, NY, November 15, 2016 – Eos Energy Storage (“Eos”) – pioneer of the safe, ultra-low cost Znyth^® battery – today announced that Jim Hughes, former CEO of First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR), has joined as Chairman of the Board to guide the company’s transition from technology development to commercial manufacturing and product deployment. The wealth of knowledge and experience Hughes brings from his time at the helm of First Solar – a pivotal player in the creation of utility-scale solar energy – will be invaluable during this important stage in Eos’ growth.

The appointment of Hughes as Chairman of the Board comes on the heels of the company’s announcement of a $23M Series D equity financing and commencement of volume battery production with a multi-billion dollar contract manufacturing partner capable of meeting 100+ MW per year demand.

“The tremendous progress made on cost over the last several years leaves energy storage looking remarkably similar to the solar industry around 5 years ago,” observed Jim Hughes. “The cost reductions have been so rapid that I don’t think the broader energy industry yet recognizes the value it will represent as part of the system and that the economics of energy storage are not only competitive but have the near term potential to be disruptive.  Eos has focused on developing a technology and product that outcompetes the lithium ion incumbent, not just on dollar per kWh upfront capital cost but on the lifetime cost of energy delivered.  This is going to give Eos the ability to win significant market share and drive profitability. A sharp focus on cost, quality and challenging yourself to beat the toughest competition has proven to be a winning strategy time and again both in traditional energy and renewables.  Much as First Solar has proven that it can compete effectively with its differentiated thin-film solar photovoltaic (PV) modules against the leading players in crystalline silicon PV, I firmly believe Eos will demonstrate the same ability within the energy storage arena with its differentiated zinc hybrid (Znyth™) technology.”

During his four years as CEO of First Solar, Hughes managed the company from a $450M loss in the first quarter of 2012 to a $171M profit in the first quarter of 2016. Also during that time, the company set new records for solar cell efficiency, made fundamental changes to power plant architecture, continued to drive down solar costs, and expanded module manufacturing to support an industry-leading over 13GW installed base.

Click Here to Read Full Article

When smart phone batteries catch fire or laptop batteries explode on airplanes, it makes the news.

So far batteries used to store energy at the residential and commercial level have avoided those headlines. But eventually there will be a problem.

“Battery fires are rare, but when they happen you have to be prepared,” said Lt. Paul Rogers with the Fire Department of New York’s hazardous materials operations division.

Rogers works with a team within FDNY’s hazardous materials operations division, and he has become the point person on energy storage safety issues. “I am a one man show,” he said, operating as a liaison with regulators, researchers and industry.

As the headlines suggest, much of the current safety concerns about batteries revolve around lithium-ion batteries. Those concerns are well founded: Li-ion batteries have a lion’s share of the energy storage market and are the fastest growing storage technology.

Li-ion batteries have become ubiquitous in laptops and smart phones. But batteries used for grid-tied stationary storage applications are quite different than those used in robust, long term use case scenarios such as behind-the-meter applications or on a transmission or distribution system, said William Tokash, a senior research analyst with Navigant Research.

Grid connected batteries have sophisticated software systems that manage the battery during charging and discharging cycles, and they are equipped with thermal control systems and software designed to ensure safe operation, as well as early detection of any operating concerns.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Societal challenge

Generating energy and saving it with as little loss as possible is one of the major challenges for today’s society. Energy production and storage usually take place in different systems – which is inefficient. This is different in the new biosupercapacitor, which combines both processes.

“Such a technology could, for instance, be interesting for miniaturised devices, which should even supply themselves with energy wirelessly. This is particularly important for implantable miniaturised sensors,” says Prof Dr Wolfgang Schuhmann from the Bochum Institute for Analytical Chemistry. He was involved in the development with his colleagues Dr Felipe Conzuelo, Dr Piyanut Pinyou and Sabine Alsaoub.

Enzymes at both electrodes

With the aid of an enzyme, the biosupercapacitor burns glucose as a fuel at one electrode. At the other electrode, an enzyme converts oxygen into water. Both enzymes must be embedded in an electron-conducting gel in order to establish the electrical contact to the electrodes. For the first time, the team used the same gel, also called a redox polymer, for both electrodes.

When charging up and storing the energy, this redox polymer at one electrode gives off electrons and is thus positively charged. At the other electrode, it takes in the electrons and is thus negatively charged. “During the discharging process, the charges equal out and a current flows,” explains Schuhmann.

High capacity

The system set up in this manner showed itself to be stable in the researchers’ tests and can serve as a permanent source of energy. It has a low weight and a high capacity, so it can hold a large charge. “We see this work as a starting point for future strategies in the development of new, highly functional and also affordable electrical sources of energy on bioelectrochemical basis,” summarise the authors.

Click Here to Read Full Article

CALMAC‘s ice-based thermal energy storage technology was implemented into the Naval Post Graduate School’s Integrated Multi-Physics Renewable Energy Laboratory in Monterey, California.

The IMPREL microgrid project uses various forms of energy storage to store energy in the form it will be needed in, and a unique multi-physics approach to optimize the use of onsite sources of renewable energy. CALMAC’s ice-based energy storage provided the microgrid with a durable and smart technology for flexible use of solar and wind to store cooling.

“Ice-based energy storage is the low-hanging fruit of the industry,” said Mark MacCracken, CEO of CALMAC. “The biggest advantage that fossil fuels have over renewable energy resources is that a barrel of oil or lump of coal is a form of stored energy that can be released at any time. Sun and wind are forms of pure energy that, without being paired with energy storage, are either used or wasted. Luckily, energy storage can easily be integrated into our buildings and power grid.”

Energy storage is an integral technology for microgrids, which can act as a single entity that can connect to the power grid or work independently from the grid in what is called “island-mode.” The multi-physics approach used by the IMPREL matches demand to the supply of electricity created by onsite photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. To achieve independence from the rest of the grid, energy is either used as it is generated or stored for later use when output dips. This differs from the traditional approach of our power grid where supply is dictated by demand. In fact, the traditional approach does not account well for the intermittence of renewable energy output, often leading to times when end-user demand surpasses renewable output and vice versa.  

“Applying the multi-physics approach to our microgrid project, over the traditional microgrid approach, allowed for the use of fewer renewable energy sources to meet demand, reducing size, costs and the amount of unused energy,” said Dr. Anthony Gannon, Assistant Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, Naval Postgraduate School. “Using thermal energy storage allowed for the project to greatly reduce its costs and improve efficiency by storing the energy in the form that it would be ultimately used in. Based on the project’s operation, we feel like this design could easily be scaled-up for larger applications.”

Click Here to Read Full Article

SANTA CLARA, Calif. & SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Green Charge and REC Solar today announced plans to build the largest commercial solar-plus-energy storage project in Sonoma County.

Green Charge’s one megawatt (MW) commercial energy storage system paired with REC Solar’s solar system will be installed at SOMO Village in Rohnert Park, Calif. The combined solar-plus-storage system is expected to deliver more than $160,000 savings to SOMO Village in the first year and more than $1.8 million over the first 10 years of operations.

SOMO Village is a mixed-use development with approximately 600,000 sf of commercial space with 50 businesses employing around 1,000 people. The property consumes nearly six MW of energy annually and redevelopment plans include a host of shops, apartments, homes and neighborhoods. SOMO Village currently has existing solar systems onsite, which are now expanded to bring the total to 16,000 solar panels at the 200-acre campus, creating Sonoma County’s largest solar-plus-storage project.

SOMO Village was the first development in North America to be named a “One Planet Community” by Bioregional, an organization that works with partners to champion a better, more sustainable way to live, work and do business. Bioregional’s One Planet Living framework uses ecological and carbon footprinting as its primary guiding principles. The principles are based on ten criteria, including zero carbon emissions.

“SOMO Village is a leader in renewable energy adoption,” said Alan Russo, senior vice president of sales and marketing at REC Solar. “We are proud to be their energy partner and to work alongside the Green Charge team to maximize the impact of their solar investment.”

Commercial and industrial organizations such as SOMO Village are increasingly adding energy storage to decrease their dependence on a centralized electrical grid and to augment the economic benefits of their solar systems. Rocky Mountain Institute found that the increase in solar photovoltaic (PV) self-consumption due to the addition of energy storage has a value of about $25 per kilowatt-year and that demand charge reduction could be worth as much as $200 per kilowatt-year. With solar-plus-storage, businesses can consume all the solar power they produce rather than feeding it back to the grid. This lowers demand charges, offsets energy purchases and reduces utility bills.

Click Here to Read Full Article

The European-funded project will allow participating homes to store excess solar energy in either batteries or hot water tanks for use in the evenings.

Energy storage technology means less reliance on the grid, creating more sustainable communities. The project will also research the issues and parameters of community energy schemes that sell and share self-generated energy from homes in the project.

It will use ‘communal batteries’ as part of this, located in the area’s schools.

Some 37 homes from across the neighbourhood will take part in the project, and 22 of these will receive technology that will allow them to use significantly more of their clean green energy generated from their own solar photovoltaic (PV) panels. Installation begins early 2017.

This innovative project, SENSIBLE, which aims to show positive ways to reduce fuel poverty, is led by The University of Nottingham and MOZES, the Meadow’s ‘Community Energy Group’.

The Meadows is an ideal community to trial the technology as it has a large proportion of houses across different tenures, housing types and ages and socio-economic groups installed with solar PV panels following the receipt of a Department of Environment and Climate Change grant in 2010 which made it one of 11 UK Low Carbon Communities.

Its residents are therefore relatively used to ‘test’ initiatives regarding energy and efficiency because of this and the related work MOZES does within the community. This range of demographics relating to how and when electrical energy is used in The Meadows will go on to help the SENSIBLE researchers to draw more accurate conclusions from the gathered data.

Julian Marsh, architect and member of MOZES said: “This project is making the most of domestic solar energy generation; this means more energy will stay within the community, reducing the need to draw on energy from the grid, thus reducing household electricity bills.”

Click Here to Read Full Article

While cost (down) and capacity (up) have been the focus of much of the hype around Tesla’s newly launched Powerwall 2, the US company’s addition of an inverter to its second-generation battery units could also have major market implications.

At least that is the view of Simon Hackett, seasoned cleantech investor and CEO of Australian energy storage company Redflow, which makes zinc-bromine flow batteries and whose newly launched ZCell competes with Tesla’s Powerwall in the residential battery storage space.

In a blog published on his website on Monday, Hackett argues that Tesla’s launch of the Powerwall 2 battery with a built-in AC inverter marks “a clear breakpoint” for manufacturers of home energy storage systems, by taking a leaf from the Appleplay-book of vertical integration.

“As with the Apple product ecosystem, this aims to establish Tesla as a single entry point for energy generation and storage systems in the home environment,” he writes. “Tesla has both the name and the resources to become a strong player in this realm.”

But Hackett believes that this “vertical stance” will take Tesla in the opposite direction to most of the rest of the industry, which has tended to more of a “horizontal” orientation: “a commercial ecosystem that offers choice at all layers of the energy storage system, using standardised interfaces to allow mix-and-match assembly of devices in the solution ‘stack’.”

The move also puts the company into direct opposition to its former allies, says Hackett – both existing inverter/charger vendors, that may be cut out of the Tesla solution set, and experienced energy system installers.

“The Powerwall 2 unveiling is an interesting day for inverter/charger vendors such as Solar Edge, manufacturer of the inverter of choice for the original Powerwall, which is no longer required with Powerwall 2.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E, San Francisco, California, U.S.) has successfully completed a technology demonstration project to explore the performance of battery storage systems participating in California’s electricity markets.

The energy storage project, funded by California’s Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) program, began in 2014 and utilized PG&E’s 2 megawatt (MW) Vaca-Dixon and 4 MW Yerba Buena battery storage systems to provide energy and ancillary services in California Independent System Operator (CAISO) markets.

The Vaca-Dixon system is the first battery storage resource in California to participate in the market. The Yerba Buena system is the first battery storage resource to both participate in the market and serve a reliability function supporting PG&E’s distribution system in the event of a disturbance or outage.

“We see great potential for energy storage systems to benefit Californians. Through this demonstration PG&E has addressed multiple barriers and gained incredible operational experience with battery storage,” said Kevin Dasso, vice president, Electric Asset Management, PG&E.

In 2017, PG&E will utilize the Yerba Buena battery, located in the San Jose foothills, for another EPIC technology demonstration involving the coordination of 3^rd-party distributed energy resources (DERs) – such as residential and commercial solar PV – using smart inverters and battery storage controlled through a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS).

A report can be downloaded from PG&E’s EPIC Program website: www.pge.com/

Click Here to Read Full Article