Microsoft is joining NRG Energy at The University of Texas at San Antonio’s (UTSA) Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute (TSERI) to announce new research showing that batteries can help ease the transition to a grid increasingly powered by renewables.

The research reveals new information about power efficiencies at different currents and how to operate batteries at scale. The research program, begun in spring 2016 and designed to continue until at least the spring of 2017, is looking at the performance and economic potential of flow battery technology in a variety of applications, from powering data centers to optimizing electric distribution grids.

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A supercapacitor is a double-layer capacitor that has very high capacitance but low voltage limits. Supercapacitors store more electrical energy, rated in farads (F), at an electrode-electrolyte interface than electrolytic capacitors. They consist of two metal plates that are coated only with a porous material known as activated carbon. As a result, they have a bigger area for storing much more charge.

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Australian power company AGL is to install the largest ‘virtual power plant’ in the world in Adelaide, South Australia using batteries from San Francisco-headquartered energy storage firm Sunverge Energy.

AGL will install 1,000 centrally controlled batteries in South Australian homes and businesses with a combined 5MW/7MWh storage capacity. The AU$20 million (US$15.4 million) project aims to help solve the state’s grid challenges and reduce the risk of power price shocks in the state. Last month saw a raging national debate over whether renewables had caused extreme electricity price hikes in the state with some claiming that renewables are being deployed too fast for the grid to cope. However new energy ministerJosh Frydenburg said that there were a number of complex factors in the price hikes with renewables only a small part of the problem.

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Renewable energy technology has been split into two camps since it became a reality around the turn of the century.

On the one hand there are the passionate environmental believers for whom the inflated subsidies were an irrelevance in the face of saving our planet, and on the other were naysayers for whom the arguments about global warming were a plot by the far left to raise taxes or run some kind of tree-hugging environmental agenda at the expense of business and consumers.

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The energy trilemma is widely recognised as the need to achieve a low-carbon, cost-effective and secure energy source. It’s like a three piece puzzle – it should be simple to complete – but the commercial models currently in use always leave a piece missing.

Fossil fuels are cost-effective and secure, but they are not low-carbon. Renewable energy is clean and cost-effective, but intermittent. As such, the majority of the world is currently reliant on generating energy from fossil fuels to fill the troughs in renewable energy supply. But if we are to meet the COP21 targets then it is vital that fossil fuels are gradually phased out.

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Energy storage is a new disruptive trend. It basically involves storing energy that can later be harnessed for electricity to power our homes, our cars – our future.

The first part of the future of clean energy is for all vehicles to move from polluting gasoline, diesel and natural gas to run on electricity. Hence, the electric vehicle (EV) boom has only just begun. Tony Seba, in his video on “clean energy disruption” and others, expect EVs to be cheaper than Internal Combustion Energy (ICE) cars by 2020, and this will signal the accelerated take-off of the EV boom. You can read more about the EV boom here andhere.

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Energy storage is coming in a big way in the U.S. and around the world, but before it does, the industry needs to figure out how installing batteries is going to make customers money. Building batteries in buildings or on the utility’s grid isn’t going to be done because it’s cool or somehow saves the planet — it’ll be done because it makes money. And energy storage has the ability to make a lot of money.

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If you thought renewable energy was the big thing of our times, you’d be only partially right. The bigger thing is energy storage – the key to making renewable energy sustainable and reliable; the key to making it practically useful and more than a fad.

There is a truly huge race on to create cheap storage systems, and the greener they are, the better. For instance, you know quinones? These chemical compounds — pigments that are found in a variety of plants — can be used as the basis of organic molecules to make flow batteries. One team of researchers at Harvard, no less, is working on just that: an organic flow battery that is cheap, environmentally friendly, and easily scalable.

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The US energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, believes the advances being made in storage technology means that the country will be completely decarbonised by the 2050s.

A global race, seen initially in Europe and the US is leading to a rapid acceleration in innovation that may dispense with the need for nuclear and thermal power by that time according to the technology’s backers, as the Achilles heel of intermittency will no longer impact on the overall effectiveness of renewables.

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Stem, one of the leading providers of commercial energy-storage systems, just added $100 million in new financing from energy infrastructure investor Starwood Energy Group. Stem’s project financing resources now top $350 million.

It’s going to take many billions in project financing to move the energy storage market from nascent to material — and Stem now leads in the ability to direct capital to commercial behind-the-meter storage projects. The deployments aim to combine big data, analytics and energy storage to benefit the ratepayer as well as the grid operator. 

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