Mines worldwide extract more than 11.9 million metric tons of zinc annually. There are zinc mines in over 50 countries around the world, and while the metal plays a key role in the steel industry, few people understand its transformative role in the energy storage sector. When most people think of the metals that power today’s energy storage systems, vanadium and lithium are at front of mind.

However, one of the challenges to growing an energy storage industry is the dependency on a supply chain of hardware components, metals and chemicals many of which come from outside of North America. Metals such as lithium, vanadium, rare earths and cobalt used today in many energy storage batteries, are impacted by price volatility, security of supply and duration restrictions. On the other hand, those same risks do not apply to zinc energy flow batteries.

Best known for its industrial use in galvanising steel, Zinc is abundant and inexpensive, and without any geopolitical complications as we have a significant North American supply. Zinc utilizes the only battery chemistry that uses earth-abundant, recyclable materials with chemistry that is robust and safe. Unlike lithium-ion technology, which requires new stacks in order to scale, zinc batteries are able to decouple the linkage between energy and power. This means that scaling the zinc battery technology can be accomplished by simply increasing the size of the energy storage tank and quantity of the recharged zinc particles.

Zinc-air batteries use oxygen from the atmosphere to extract power from zinc, making zinc-air battery production costs the lowest of all rechargeable batteries. Zinc-air batteries are non-flammable and non-toxic with a longer lifetime as compared to other batteries.

The zinc-air cell doesn’t require expensive and hard-to-find materials and can be manufactured locally which contributes to our North American economy. When combined with PV panels, zinc-air storage delivers a renewable, reliable, and affordable source of power.

Rethink Energy Research has released a new report exploring the pace at which global energy markets are deploying energy storage projects and the factors driving them to do so.

According to the report, USA Flying start triggers rush for Energy Storage Leadership, actions by utilities in the US to expand their energy storage capacity more than any other utilities in the early 2020s is triggering a global rush to leadership.

Global utilities, led by those in the US, have in the past weeks commissioned projects that will enable the energy storage market to double in 2020 and 2021, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

The capacity commissioned will allow the storage market to have a ten-year annual growth rate in excess of 44.8%.

By 2029, the global battery storage capacity is expected to hit 1,462GWh up from 6.9GW today.

The US is expected to lead through 2024 by installing 27.7GW of new capacity. However, China its expected to take the leadership role by 2029.

The rest of the Asia Pacific, led by South Korea, India and Japan, as well as Europe, led by Germany and the UK, but also augmented by Italy, Spain and even the Netherlands and Belgium, will end this forecast period neck and neck with the USA, all chasing second place behind China. Latin America, Middle East and Africa will be far smaller markets.

By 2030 the situation will look like this:
China 107 GW
USA 77.6 GW
Europe 77.3 GW
Asia Pacific 76.5 GW

The activity in and around the 4-hour battery power storage using lithium-ion market is accelerating in the US so fast that by 2024, it will have overhauled the 100-year-old lead that pumped storage has in the storage market and installed more GW.

By 2030 it will have installed close to 4 times the amount that pumped storage ever reached at 77.6 GW of capacity, able to output solidly for 4 hours, in total some 310.4 GWh of battery cells.

Siemens Energy has formed a partnership aimed at sustainably decarbonising the industrial sector with Norway-headquartered thermal energy storage company EnergyNest.

EnergyNest makes what it calls Thermal Batteries, where a specially formulated concrete (which the company has trademarked Heatcrete) is heated using high temperature heat transfer fluid (HTF) that passes through steel pipes inside the units. The company claims the energy can be stored with minimal heat loss, then as the battery discharges, cold HTF flows into the bottom of the battery unit and the heat comes out of the top.

The Thermal Batteries are intended to be modular and are housed in 20ft units, with modules designed to be transported easily and much of the pipework prefabricated and tested before being sent to project sites. The materials used are abundant, can be recycled and are non-hazardous while the startup claims systems can be cost-effective as well as compact, with high energy density and with little heat lost, scalable from MWh to GWh capacities.

With Siemens already having worked with EnergyNest including a 1MWh project begun in 2015 to verify the technology at Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, Siemens Energy – the spun-out business division of Siemens formerly known as Siemens Gas and Power – has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with EnergyNest.

Targeting the development of their first commercial systems together within a year, the pair have formed a “long-term partnership to develop thermal energy storage solutions for industrial customers,” EnergyNest said in a press release sent to Energy-Storage.news.

Eos Energy Storage is a private zinc battery developer with the chance to go public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.

B. Riley Principal Merger Corp II (BMRG), a special purpose acquisition company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Eos have executed a letter of intent for a merger which would result in Eos becoming a publicly listed company.

Investors seem fascinated by energy storage this year, the long-duration variety in particular — and Eos Energy Storage with its four- to six-hour duration, potentially joins the long duration technologies of Form Energy and Quidnet as recipients of big capital. QuantumScape, a solid-state lithium ion battery builder, received up to $200 million from Volkswagen earlier this month.

Eos claims its zinc technology, twelve years in development, is a safe, scalable, and recyclable alternative to lithium ion.

An alternative to lithium ion

Eos has spent over $160 million from investors including AltEnergy, Holtec International, Reservoir Capital Group, and Generation Capital to develop its four- to six-hour zinc battery alternative to lithium-ion chemistry.

U.S. Q1 2020 energy storage deployments reached 98 MW in Q1 of 2020, according to WoodMac, and roughly 500 MW in 2019 — of which only a few megawatts were non-lithium-ion chemistries. Lithium-ion batteries have their disadvantages — high reactivity, conflict minerals and environmental risk — but they are the clear-cut dominant winner in today’s battery race.

Eos has long touted a $160 per kilowatt-hour price target and a goal of over 10,000 cycles with its zinc hybrid cathode design. Eos has worked with Siemens and Engie. In 2016, First Solar CEO, Jim Hughes, was the chairman of the board.

Fluidic Energy, also working on a zinc-air battery, was acquired by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, and is now NantEnergy.

Hydrogen has the greatest potential among technologies for seasonal energy storage in the future, according to an analysis conducted by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Seasonal energy storage can facilitate the deployment of high and ultra-high shares of wind and solar energy sources, according to Omar Guerra, a research engineer at NREL and lead author of a new paper, “The value of seasonal energy storage technologies for the integration of wind and solar power.” The article appears in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Guerra’s co-authors, all from NREL, are Jiazi Zhang, Joshua Eichman, Paul Denholm, Jennifer Kurtz, and Bri-Mathias Hodge. They developed a multi-model approach that considers both the estimated cost and value of storage technologies in determining cost-competitiveness. They analyzed 80 scenarios involving hydrogen, pumped hydro, and compressed air in making their determination.

“This is perhaps the most comprehensive techno-economic assessment of seasonal storage performed to date,” Guerra said. “Based on the estimated value provided to the grid, we have identified the specific conditions, such as power- and energy-related costs, round-trip efficiency, and discharge duration, under which a given storage technology is cost competitive.”

Their analysis assumed 84% of the U.S. Western electricity grid is generated by renewable sources.

The study included the cost of seasonal storage based on the power capacity and energy capacity. While that is common in energy storage analysis, the researchers included potential revenues of capacity value, which is the cost to build new peaking plants to supply electrical demand; and, uniquely, accounted for avoided grid operating costs. Previous studies into energy storage do not consider the potential benefits to the grid. Using that information, a benefit-to-cost ratio analysis was conducted to determine the profitability of the storage technologies.

The analysis focused on two time frames for the economic assessment: the near future, from 2025-2045; and the future, 2050-2070.

An ITC for standalone energy storage systems could finally become reality with its inclusion in a US$1.5 trillion infrastructure investment Bill, tabled by House Democrats.

Our sister site PV Tech reported earlier this week that the ‘Moving Forward Act’ includes measures to support solar and other renewables, including an investment of more than US$70 billion to help modify the electric grid across America to accommodate for renewable energy.

It also included grant programmes for solar in low income communities and at schools, pledged to reduce the soft costs of project development such as streamlining permitting and to set targets for renewable energy deployment. The Act has been welcomed by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and SEIA CEO Abigail Ross Hopper said it could “help put American solar workers in a position to lead economic recovery”.

US Energy Storage Association (ESA) CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman also said this week that the inclusion of energy storage in the act was “greatly appreciated” and that “these these common-sense, forward-looking policies with bipartisan and bicameral support are crucial”.

The eligibility for energy storage for the investment tax credit (ITC), which currently only applies a rebate to project developers and stakeholders if the energy storage is combined with solar and installed at the same time as the solar i.e. no retrofits, the promotion of electricity storage on the grid particularly to support electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure and the slightly more vague promise to promote innovation in energy storage were all welcomed by the ESA CEO.

Adding well-optimised energy storage to solar PV projects in the US state of Massachusetts can increase project revenues by up to 50%, Stem Inc has claimed, as the energy storage provider announced the completion of a front-of-meter solar project with 8MWh of storage.

Energy-Storage.news reported last July as Stem Inc announced the formation of a partnership wth private equity firm Syncarpha Capital to develop 28.2MWh of energy storage projects colocated with solar PV in Massachusetts. This week Stem Inc, which touts the artificial intelligence (AI)-driven capabilities of its storage systems, said that the project is the first of five from the pair to be completed.

The just-completed project, in Blandford, near Springfield, MA, is one of four AC-coupled front-of-the-meter projects Syncarpha and Stem are collaborating on, with one DC-coupled project rounding off the portfolio. PV generation capacity of the Blandford site is just under 5MW, Stem said. It also marks Stem’s first project as an independent power producer (IPP). Syncarpha Capital meanwhile has also struck a deal with ENGIE Storage for a 19MW / 38MWh community solar-plus-storage portfolio in the state, for which ENGIE will supply storage and control systems.

Energy storage deployment in Massachusetts has been driven by a number of supportive policies. The state has a target in place to deploy 200MWh of storage by the end of this year and 1,000MWh by 2025. In a recent interview, Jason Burwen, policy director of the national Energy Storage Association told this site that the state’s leaders, including Governor Charlie Baker, have chosen to pursue that target “not through a single energy storage policy” but “through distributing energy storage into many different programmes and feeding it through those” in an interview on state-level targets for storage published this week.

One major programme is the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) scheme, which incentivises solar installations with rebates and sets a 3.2GW target for PV. SMART now also stipulates that solar PV systems over 500kW need to be combined with storage, with an increased incentive added to match.

Last year Bloomberg reported that the price of energy produced from wind and solar had fallen below the cost of energy produced from coal.

This was found to be true in Britain, France and Germany. It means that renewable energy can now compete with fossil fuels on price, without requiring government subsidies.

However, renewable energy is only cheap when it is being produced. When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, we remain dependent on fossil fuels and nuclear power. It is possible to store energy produced from renewable sources but the current options are limited. A huge increase in grid-level energy storage is likely to be required as electricity is fully transitioned to renewable sources such as wind and solar.

There are a few established technologies for grid-level energy storage. The oldest is pumped-storage hydroelectricity in which energy is stored by pumping water up to an elevated reservoir and then allowed to flow back down through a turbine to generate electricity when required. More recently, grid-scale battery banks are starting to be installed. In their current form, neither of these technologies can be deployed at the scale and rapidity needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to safe levels.

An innovative pumped-storage hydroelectricity technology uses a concrete sphere located on the seabed as the lower reservoir. No upper reservoir or transmission pipe is required since the surrounding seawater provides the necessary water pressure. This has significant potential to provide near-term highly scaleable grid-level energy storage, integrated with other offshore power facilities.

Conventional hydro
The most economical way of storing really large amounts of energy is pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH). This stores surplus electricity as potential energy, typically by pumping water from a low-lying reservoir up to another reservoir located much higher up in a mountainous region. When electricity is needed, the water is allowed to flow back down to the lower reservoir, passing through a turbine that generates electricity. Round-trip energy efficiency is typically 70 to 80%. Total global installations of PSH amount to 127GW, over 99% of the world’s bulk-storage capacity.

Construction is beginning on the world’s largest liquid air battery, which will store renewable electricity and reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants.

The project near Manchester, U.K., will use spare green energy to compress air into a liquid and store it. When demand is higher, the liquid air is released back into a gas, powering a turbine that puts the green energy back into the grid.

A big expansion of wind and solar energy is vital to tackle the climate emergency, but they are not always available. Storage is therefore key, and the new project will be the largest in the world outside of pumped hydro schemes, which require a mountain reservoir to store water.

The new liquid air battery, being developed by Highview Power, is due to be operational in 2022 and will be able to power up to 200,000 homes for five hours, and store power for many weeks. Chemical batteries are also needed for the transition to a zero-carbon world and are plummeting in price, but can only store relatively small amounts of electricity for short periods.

Liquid air batteries can be constructed anywhere, said Highview’s chief executive, Javier Cavada: “Air is everywhere in the world. The main competitor is really not other storage technologies but fossil fuels, as people still want to continue building gas and coal-fired plants today, strangely enough,” he said.

The U.K. government has supported the project with a $12.5 million grant. The energy and clean growth minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, said: “This revolutionary new facility will form a key part of our push towards net zero, bringing greater flexibility to Britain’s electricity grid and creating green-collar jobs in Greater Manchester.

“Projects like these will help us realize the full value of our world-class renewables, ensuring homes and businesses can still be powered by green energy, even when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing,” he said.

The U.K. government is being urged to make the economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic a green one. “We owe it to future generations to build back better,” said the prime minister, Boris Johnson, recently, while the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is reported to be planning a “green industrial revolution.”