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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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/

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A study by Navigant Research indicates nearly two GW of energy storage systems have been announced worldwide so far this year.

Navigant said new project announcements are coming on a regular basis, and various companies are exploring new ways to make energy storage systems profitable.

Lithium ion batteries remain the top method of energy storage for new projects, accounting of 83 percent of the new capacity through the third quarter of 2016.

Distributed energy storage systems are becoming more popular, as they accounted for 14 percent of new energy storage projects so far.

“DESSs are generally much smaller than utility-scale systems and are expected to thrive as they become more cost-effective and productized, leading to more streamlined installation and opening new markets,” said Ian McClenny, a research associate with Navigant Research.

Projects using flow batteries and hybrid battery systems are also becoming more common. 

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The largest solar and energy storage system in Connecticut was recently opened, by the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative (CMEEC) and Norwich Public Utilities (NPU), in partnership with SolarCity and Brightfields Development.  NPU will now provide its customers with solar power as part of its current electric service and without an additional charge. When added to NPU’s existing hydropower capabilities, the NPU energy portfolio is now nearly 20% renewable.

The 4.7 megawatt Mountain Ash Solar Farm includes more than 15,000 solar panels on a 15-acre site, and is expected to produce enough solar energy over the next two decades to power more than 8,400 homes for a year.

As highlighted in the full press release on NPU’s website, the energy storage system installed at the Mountain Ash Farm is SolarCity’s first project to utilize its proprietary GridLogic control platform to provide capacity services to a utility. The 750 kilowatt energy storage system will provide up to 3,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. SolarCity is providing engineering, installation, and maintenance of a battery storage system, which through the Gridlogic platform, allows CMEEC to remotely and instantaneously dispatch stored solar energy in the event of increased demand or large-scale power outages in its service territory.

Under the terms of the 20-year solar purchase power agreement with SolarCIty, CMEEC will utilize the clean solar energy produced at Mountain Ash Farm. The energy storage system, also financed by SolarCity, will allow CMEEC to pay a fixed-rate for capacity, which lowers its operating costs and helps keep prices stable for its member organizations and their customers.

{Editor’s Note: The NPU facility at Mountain Ash Farm was highlighted in the Nov. 7, 2016 NY Times’ article: “Power Couple: Tie-Up Shows How Batteries and Solar May Link” more recent NY Times article, which also provides updates on the Tesla/SolarCity merger.]

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