2020 was among the most unexpected years in American history but despite a global pandemic, a renewed civil rights movement, and the most tumultuous election in memory one trend held steady: clean energy’s unstoppable rise.

From coal’s complete collapse, to plummeting clean tech prices and booming renewable energy installations, not to mention every Democratic presidential candidate running on ambitious climate action, decarbonization proved it is the path forward to a strong economy and safe climate future.

But how will 2021 shake out? Five leading policy experts shared their predictions for the year ahead, envisioning an even faster acceleration to a clean energy economy than ever before. From unprecedented federal climate policy to surging energy storage installations and a shift away from gas toward sustainable investment and just transitions, the next 12 months could mark the turning point away from fossil fuels.

A federal clean energy standard and “breakout year” for building electrification

Leah Stokes, Assistant Professor, University of California-Santa Barbara

The Georgia runoff election result—where two Democratic Senators were elected, shifting the United States Senate to Democratic control—means that the outlook for federal action on climate is even brighter in 2021. We have the best opportunity in more than a decade to act on the climate crisis.

This year, I think we will finally see Congress pass a Clean Electricity Standard (CES), after three decades of effort. Over the past several years, numerous CES bills, including some bipartisan ones, have been introduced in Congress. President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on a bold climate platform, which included a pledge of 100% clean power by 2035—a specific target he repeated again and again on the campaign trail. This is a tried and true approach: Already, more than one in three Americans live in a state or city that is targeting 100% clean power. Congress has a clear mandate to act on a CES as soon as possible this year. 

Cranes are a familiar fixture of practically any city skyline, but one in the Swiss City of Ticino, near the Italian border, would stand out anywhere: It has six arms. This 110-meter-high starfish of the skyline isn’t intended for construction. It’s meant to prove that renewable energy can be stored by hefting heavy loads and dispatched by releasing them.

Energy Vault, the Swiss company that built the structure, has already begun a test program that will lead to its first commercial deployments in 2021. At least one competitor, Gravitricity, in Scotland, is nearing the same point. And there are at least two companies with similar ideas, New Energy Let’s Go and Gravity Power, that are searching for the funding to push forward.

To be sure, nearly all the world’s currently operational energy-storage facilities, which can generate a total of 174 gigawatts, rely on gravity. Pumped hydro storage, where water is pumped to a higher elevation and then run back through a turbine to generate electricity, has long dominated the energy-storage landscape. But pumped hydro requires some very specific geography—two big reservoirs of water at elevations with a vertical separation that’s large, but not too large. So building new sites is difficult.

Energy Vault, Gravity Power, and their competitors seek to use the same basic principle—lifting a mass and letting it drop—while making an energy-storage facility that can fit almost anywhere. At the same time they hope to best batteries—the new darling of renewable-energy storage—by offering lower long-term costs and fewer environmental issues.

Vistra Corp’s Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility is connected to the power grid and began operating in December 2020. At 300 megawatts/1,200 megawatt-hours, the lithium-ion battery storage system, located on-site at Vistra’s Moss Landing Power Plant in Monterey County, California, will be the largest of its kind in the world. Furthermore, construction is already underway on Phase II, which will add an additional 100 MW/400 MWh to the facility by August 2021, bringing its total capacity to 400 MW/1,600 MWh.

“This is a keystone project and it is important in so many ways – it revitalizes an existing power plant site and utilizes active transmission lines, enhances grid stability, fills the reliability gap created by intermittent renewables, provides emission-free electricity, supports California’s sustainability goals and mandates, significantly benefits the local community, and ultimately provides affordable electricity to consumers,” said Curt Morgan, chief executive officer of Vistra. “A battery system of this size and scale has never been built before. As our country transitions to a clean energy future, batteries will play a pivotal role and the Vistra Moss Landing project will serve as the model for utility-scale battery storage for years to come.”

Housed inside the power plant’s completely refurbished former turbine building and spanning the length of nearly three football fields, Phase I of the battery system can power approximately 225,000 homes during peak electricity pricing periods. The system is made up of more than 4,500 stacked battery racks or cabinets, each containing 22 individual battery modules, which capture excess electricity from the grid, largely during high solar-output hours, and can release the power when energy demand is at its highest and solar electricity is declining, usually early morning and late afternoon. For further information see the IDTechEx report on Batteries for Stationary Energy Storage 2021-2031.

A battery storage project aimed at adding more carbon-free power to California’s electric grid is about to launch in the San Diego area.

EnerSmart, a renewable energy company based in San Diego and Boulder, Colorado, has signed a $20 million order with Eos Energy to install 10 facilities of 3-megawatts each that will employ zinc battery storage technology. Each of the projects will supply enough energy to power about 2,000 homes.

Seven of the 10 storage sites will be located in San Diego County and EnerSmart plans to have each one up and running by the end of the year.

The deal will provide at least 30 megawatts of utility-scale battery storage capacity to the grid. Over the next 24 months, EnerSmart has an option with Eos Energy to double both the size of its investment and the number of the project’s battery storage sites.

“If there’s a need for more, then we’ll do more,” said James Beach, managing partner at EnerSmart.

The seven facilities already under contract will be installed in Chula Vista, El Cajon, Imperial Beach, Lakeside, Ramona, along with two in San Diego.

“What makes our projects unique is that because they are 3-megawatt, the energy can go into lower voltage distribution lines so we’re really providing voltage support to the local communities,” Beach said.

The electricity and voltage support discharged from the 10 batteries will go to the California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, the nonprofit corporation that manages about 80 percent of the power grid in the state.

Energy storage is taking on a larger and more pivotal role in California’s power mix. Under the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, 60 percent of California’s electricity must come from renewable sources by 2020. In 2045, 100 percent is slated to be derived by sources that emit zero carbon.

January 7 (Renewables Now) – Texas-based Vistra Energy (NYSE:VST) has brought online its 300-MW/1,200-MWh Moss Landing energy storage facility in California’s Monterey County.

The lithium-ion battery system was hooked to the local power grid and kicked off operations on December 11, 2020, Vistra said in a statement on Wednesday. The company is currently implementing a second stage of the project that will expand the overall capacity to 400 MW/1,600 MWh. The 100-MW/400-MWh Phase II will become operational by August 2021.

“A battery system of this size and scale has never been built before,”said Vistra’s CEO Curt Morgan.

In its current configuration, the Moss Landing  battery energy storage system (BESS) is capable of storing electricity to power around 225,000 homes during peak periods. Equipped with over 4,500 stacked battery racks, each with 22 individual battery modules, the facility will operate under a long-term resource adequacy contract with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). A contract for Phase II is also in place with PG&E.

Vistra noted that the Moss Landing location provides “a unique opportunity” for extensive future expansion of installation. According to its calculations, the site can support up to 1,500 MW/6,000 MWh of storage capacity.

Irish state-owned utility Electricity Supply Board (ESB) has kicked off the year by signing a deal over two storage projects with a combined capacity of nearly 100 MWh. With the agreement, the utility enters the club of Irish utility-scale battery owners for the first time. The company said it would further expand its storage project portfolio in the future.

Ireland, which features significant wind capacity, has become a hotspot for grid-scale storage development in Europe. The country features 40% renewable energy capacity and it’s looking to increase that figure to 75% over the next years — a shift that requires significant battery storage capacity.

In this vein, ESB will develop a 60 MWh system in Dublin, and an additional 38 MWh storage system at the Aghada Generating Station in Cork. The aim is to provide storage capacity in times of high wind conditions and stability in low wind times. The Irish state utility is working with energy storage solution company Fluence and EPC service providers Powercomm Group and Kirby Group to realize the two projects.

“Fluence has extensive experience delivering energy storage for the Irish electric grid, from the country’s first battery energy storage project to the fastest system response time in the world,” said Paul McCusker, vice president of EMEA for Fluence. “We look forward to working with ESB on projects that will help Ireland meet its ambitious clean energy goals and provide a more flexible, reliable and sustainable power system.”

The Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility, the world’s largest utility-scale battery energy storage system, is now online. The 300 megawatts/1,200 megawatt-hours lithium-ion battery storage system is located on-site at Vistra’s Moss Landing Power Plant in Monterey County, California. Construction is already underway on Phase II, which will add an additional 100 MW/400 MWh to the facility by August 2021, bringing its total capacity to 400 MW/1,600 MWh.

Vistra, a power generation company that handled the project, says that, as the country transitions to a clean energy future, batteries will play a pivotal role and this project will serve as the model for utility-scale battery storage for years to come.

Phase 1 is housed inside the power plant’s refurbished former turbine building and spans the length of nearly three football fields. The system is made up of more than 4,500 stacked battery racks or cabinets, each containing 22 individual battery modules, which capture excess electricity from the grid, largely during high solar-output hours, and can release the power when energy demand is at its highest and solar electricity is declining, usually early morning and late afternoon.

Phases I and II of the Vistra Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility are backed up by long-term resource adequacy contracts with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E).

Cranes are a familiar fixture of practically any city skyline, but one in the Swiss City of Ticino, near the Italian border, would stand out anywhere: It has six arms. This 110-meter-high starfish of the skyline isn’t intended for construction. It’s meant to prove that renewable energy can be stored by hefting heavy loads and dispatched by releasing them.

Energy Vault, the Swiss company that built the structure, has already begun a test program that will lead to its first commercial deployments in 2021. At least one competitor, Gravitricity, in Scotland, is nearing the same point. And there are at least two companies with similar ideas, New Energy Let’s Go and Gravity Power, that are searching for the funding to push forward.

To be sure, nearly all the world’s currently operational energy-storage facilities, which can generate a total of 174 gigawatts, rely on gravity. Pumped hydro storage, where water is pumped to a higher elevation and then run back through a turbine to generate electricity, has long dominated the energy-storage landscape. But pumped hydro requires some very specific geography—two big reservoirs of water at elevations with a vertical separation that’s large, but not too large. So building new sites is difficult.

Energy Vault, Gravity Power, and their competitors seek to use the same basic principle—lifting a mass and letting it drop—while making an energy-storage facility that can fit almost anywhere. At the same time they hope to best batteries—the new darling of renewable-energy storage—by offering lower long-term costs and fewer environmental issues.

In action, Energy Vault’s towers are constantly stacking and unstacking 35-metric-ton bricks arrayed in concentric rings. Bricks in an inner ring, for example, might be stacked up to store 35 megawatt-hours of energy. Then the system’s six arms would systematically disassemble it, lowering the bricks to build an outer ring and discharging energy in the process.

This joule-storing Jenga game can be complicated. To maintain a constant output, one block needs to be accelerating while another is decelerating. “That’s why we use six arms,” explains Robert Piconi, the company’s CEO and cofounder.

What’s more, the control system has to compensate for gusts of wind, the deflection of the crane as it picks up and sets down bricks, the elongation of the cable, pendulum effects, and more, he says.

Dave Barry said it best when summarizing 2020: “This was a year of nonstop awfulness, a year when we kept saying it couldn’t possibly get worse, and it always did. This was a year in which our only moments of genuine, unadulterated happiness were when we were able to buy toilet paper.“ 

Luckily for many companies in the solar and storage industry, our products and services were in high demand; from a revenue perspective, 2020 was not as bad as it could have been. As businesses and employees consider the long-term benefits of continued at-home working, the demand for inexpensive and reliable behind-the-meter energy supplies is likely to be even higher in 2021. And a favorable political environment will help. So here are my predictions for solar and storage for 2021. 

1. All roof orientations are fair game for solar. Module efficiency has increased from about 13 percent to over 20 percent in the last 20 years. Coupled with the commensurate 10x price reduction, it now makes economic sense to install modules on all unshaded roof orientations. The days of ignoring northerly sloped rooftops are gone.
2. Buildings will be designed to be carbon-negative. Higher module efficiencies mean that buildings under two stories in height can be designed to be carbon-negative, that is, generating more energy than they operationally consume. The percentage of rooftops covered with solar will increase as a result.
3. Skill levels for solar and storage contractors will increase. The additional features and configuration options of an integrated solar and storage system require higher skill levels to implement. Gone are the days when installers only needed to connect a black, a red and a green wire to get a system to operate properly. Installers must be savvy with building electrical wiring, CAT 5/6 communication wiring, various wireless communications protocols, desktop and cellphone applications, and dozens of inverter/battery configuration options. Conventional electrical and roofing training is only a stepping stone for solar and storage installers.
4. The module-level power electronics duopoly will continue. Inverters from SolarEdge (power optimizers) and Enphase (microinverters) have become the standard on over 75% of rooftop installations. Patent protection on these components, coupled with manufacturing scale and National Electric Code rapid shutdown requirements, have created a significant barrier to entry for competing products. Nevertheless, technology marches forward, so leaders must continue their innovation efforts to stay ahead.