The oil and gas giants have fallen on tough times. We’re not talking can’t-afford-a-meal tough — they still have billions in cash lying around — but not-raking-in-billions-in-profit tough. Booms and busts have always rocked this industry, so executives could make a case for sitting on their cash until oil prices rebound and prosperous times return.

Or maybe the energy markets are changing and there won’t be a familiar status quo to go back to.

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High penetration of renewables in markets such as Hawaii, California, Denmark, Germany, and China is one aspect of the ongoing changes in the electricity system that points toward rising opportunity for energy storage at the residential, commercial, and utility levels. Solar and wind, in particular, as rapidly scaling forms of variable generation, could benefit from storing excess electricity generation – whether on the grid or in the home – until it is needed. At the same time, energy storage is emerging as an alternative to traditional sources of ancillary services, for voltage regulation and other grid supports. Ultimately, large-scale storage could replace peaking power plants that are needed to run only a few hours a year to meet peak demand, while also being used to provide other valuable grid services year-round.

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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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