The threat of chronic blackouts is sparking a rush to install battery backup systems as California homeowners try to avoid disruptive power cuts related to wildfires.

Blackouts are increasingly a part of life as Pacific Gas and Electric Co. strives to avoid igniting deadly blazes with aging equipment. At fault for some of the state’s worst wildfires, the utility shut off power nine times between June and October last year in Northern California. Some blackouts lasted for days, and at least one affected more than a million people.

The utility plans to use shut-offs for years as it upgrades its system (Climatewire, July 1). It’s pledged to reduce their scope and restore power more quickly.

But many residents aren’t reassured.

Nitsa Lallas and husband Ignacio Arribas, who live in the San Francisco suburb of Mill Valley, are getting two Tesla Powerwalls installed this week to store power from the solar panels on their 2,600-square-foot house.

“The primary trigger for us was when it became clear that these power shut-offs were part of the plan for the foreseeable future,” Lallas said. “PG&E was telling customers to expect them. … It appeared to us that every fire season, we would have multiple shut-offs, and that that would happen for multiple years.”

They’re not alone. Permit applications for energy storage projects are surging, according to local officials. In Sonoma County, about 80 miles north of San Francisco, 174 permits were issued in the first half of this year. That eclipsed the 161 permits that were approved in all of 2019.

Interest has boomed with advancing storage technology and since it became clear that blackouts will persist. The county issued 76 permits in 2018, and 47 in 2017, said Domenica Giovannini, policy manager for Sonoma County.

Distributed energy storage facilities in the US are set to join wholesale markets and compete to provide grid services after what’s described as the “single most important act” for the energy transition so far.

The United States Court of Appeal in the District of Columbia ruled last week against petitioning from the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and others which sought to prevent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order 841 from passing.

In doing so and allowing Order 841 to pass, distributed energy storage units can now compete with other assets, including fossil fuel resources, to provide grid services in wholesale markets.

FERC chairman Neil Chatterjee lauded the decision when it was handed down late last week, adding his consideration that it would be regarded as the “single most important act we could take to ensure a smooth transition to a new clean energy future.”

“…I’m extremely pleased that the DC Circuit denied the petitions challenging Order 841 on jurisdictional grounds and upheld our orders on the merits. The court found our actions to be well within our statutory authority,” Chatterjee said, adding that Order 841 and removing barriers for energy storage technologies had long been one of his top priorities as FERC chairman.

Low cost, large-scale energy storage is the key to accelerating the renewable energy revolution, and now shrimp have been enlisted in the cause. The aim is to push down the cost of flow batteries by using bio-based materials such as shrimp shells. That would help ramp up the transition out of fossil fuels and into clean power, thus saving the planet in time to avert a climate catastrophe. Thank you, shrimp. Wait, what is a flow battery?

Shrimp (May) Be The Key to Energy Storage That Flows
We’ll get to that flow battery thing in a minute. First let’s clarify the news about shrimp shells and energy storage, which has been zooming all over the Intertubes in recent days.

The news involves research published in April at ACS Sustainable Chemical Engineering under the title, “Exploration of Biomass-Derived Activated Carbons for Use in Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries.”

The research team did not exactly determine that shrimp shells are the best bio-based material for flow batteries. What they did was compare shrimp shells to pine wood, in order to develop a method for determining the performance of a wide variety of bio-based materials and develop a general set of design principles.

Got all that? Good! Shrimp could still come out on top, but shrimp shells are just one of many bio-based sources that could be used to produce the activated carbon used in flow batteries.

The bio-based approach is relatively new, so before anybody skips to the front of the line, there needs to be “a systematic approach to advancing biomass-based functional materials for use in energy applications,” as the research team explains.

If you know your atoms, you know what the team means when they conclude that “electrochemically accessible surface area, rather than the heteroatom composition” is a more effective representative of the material’s performance.

Spoiler alert: surface area is a big deal in energy storage performance.

The U.S. may have fallen behind Asia and Europe in battery manufacturing, but a number of well-funded companies are looking to get the country back in the game with a technology that could supersede today’s lithium-ion chemistries.

Companies including Ionic Materials, QuantumScape, Sila Nanotechnologies, Sion Power and Solid Power are developing all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) that are expected to be safer and more energy-dense than the lithium-ion products used in today’s electric vehicles and battery systems.

“Lithium-ion today, with a metal-oxide cathode and carbon-based anode, is starting to approach its theoretical limits,” said Solid Power CEO Doug Campbell in an interview.

Current lithium-ion technologies might achieve power densities of up to 300 watt-hours per kilogram, Campbell said, but not much more. “Solid-state is a platform that allows things like metallic lithium as an anode,” he said. “That’s perhaps the most direct pathway to significantly increasing the energy.”

ASSBs will not have liquid electrolytes that are susceptible to thermal runaway, so the batteries should be inherently safer. And because today’s lithium-ion products require costly thermal control systems, “a safer battery pack is a lower-cost battery pack,” Campbell said.

That combination of potential upsides is attracting big bucks. Massachusetts-based Ionic Materials has drawn investment from a fund backed by Nissan, Mitsubishi and Renault, in addition to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. Daimler has backed Sila Nanotechnologies, based in California’s Bay Area. Samsung and Hyundai have invested in Colorado-based Solid Power.

According to Wood Mackenzie, U.S. investments in ASSB and advanced lithium-ion players amounted to $300 million in 2018, $250 million in 2019 and $200 million so far this year, with the 2020 figure made up by a single cash injection from Volkswagen into QuantumScape.

The European Union (EU) has just published its Strategy for Energy System Integration, including pledges to support renewables and energy storage as the continent targets carbon neutrality by 2050.

Published through the European Commission, the strategy provides the “framework for the green energy transition,” with a particular emphasis on bringing together the disparate energy supply and demand scenarios in transportation, industry, gas and buildings – also known as ’sector coupling’.

This includes a recognition that behind-the-meter resources such as household energy storage batteries and electric vehicles (EVs) could help manage distribution grids better. EVs for example could provide 20% of Europe’s required electricity system flexibility by 2050, the Commission said, according to a new study.

Meanwhile larger-scale energy storage resources including pumped hydropower, grid battery storage as well as hydrogen (H2) electrolysers could also provide a great deal of flexibility, to help manage the system. Thermal storage at industrial facilities, closely integrating heat with power, could also be a big provider of flexibility, allowing for demand response that takes advantage of electricity price changes in real-time.

In addition to adding increased flexibility, energy system integration – planning the whole energy sector holistically – will have multiple benefits from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in difficult-to-decarbonise sectors, to increasing energy efficiency and reducing demand, to supporting European economic competitiveness, the Commission argued. It will also mean “greater consumer empowerment, improved resilience and security of supply”.