Over the past decade, prices for solar panels and wind farms have reached all-time lows. As the saying goes though, the wind isn’t always blowing and the sun isn’t always shining.

The question of how to “firm” renewables — that is, ensuring there’s always enough saved energy no matter the time of day or weather — is one of the biggest challenges in the industry. We need a good way to store energy for later. The go-to option right now is lithium ion batteries.

But, though lithium ion is dropping in price, experts say it will remain too expensive for most grid-scale applications. Right now, lithium ion batteries just can’t store more than four hours worth of energy at a price point that would make sense. Plus, they pose a fire risk and their ability to hold a charge fades over time.

Companies are experimenting with a variety of different solutions, including flow batteries, thermal batteries, and gravity-based systems. If any of these player can crack the code to long-duration energy storage, renewables like wind and solar will finally be able to compete with fossil fuels.

The colourfully-named GIGA Rhino, a 12MW battery energy storage project in the Netherlands, has successfully met a €3.6 million (US$4.03 million) crowdfunding raise target, promising around 5% interest to investors, who chipped in a minimum of €500 each.

Claimed to be the “most powerful energy storage project in the Netherlands,” by GIGA Storage, the locally-headquartered company behind the project, ENGIE was already announced as the chosen installer and NEC Energy Solutions the system supplier, back in October 2019.

Then in January, GIGA Storage put the project up on DuurzaamInvesteren (‘Sustainable investing’), a crowdfunding platform for sustainable energy projects in the European country, allowing people to invest from as little as €150. Having successfully raised the intended target, NEC ES announced via press release today that it has been confirmed to supply the GIGA Rhino system.

GIGA Storage’s special purpose vehicle (SPV) GIGA Rhino BV, will issue a bond loan covered by the income from the sale electricity to the grid’s balancing market, as well as capacity and joining the grid operator, TenneT’s reserve market, as well as providing energy storage services to aid local renewable energy integration.

The system will be hosted at The Test Centre for Renewable Resources at Wageningen University & Research Institute, Lelystad, a university well-known for its life sciences and agricultural research departments in the central Netherlands food-growing regions.

“Due to the increase in sustainable renewable energy on the grid, there is an increasing need for energy storage. Storage and control of electricity is crucial for a reliable and affordable energy system. The GIGA Rhino energy storage system is the first step in making it possible to close down coal-fired power stations,” GIGA Storage CEO Ruud Nijs, said.

Researchers are eyeing the world’s most basic element—water—as a potential solution for the challenge of how to store renewable energy for long-term use.

A team from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIAS) has shown in new research that something called seasonal pumped hydropower storage (SPHS) could be an affordable and sustainable way to store both energy and water annually.

“The energy sectors of most countries are undergoing a transition to renewable energy sources, particularly wind and solar generation,” says IIASA postdoc Julian Hunt, one of the researchers on the project, in a press statement. “These sources are intermittent and have seasonal variations, so they need storage alternatives to guarantee that the demand can be met at any time.”

Hunt and his collaborators believe hydrogen is the most viable long-term energy storage to resolve these variations in electricity generation. However, this type of storage is not yet economically feasible, which is why the IIAS team set out to analyze SPHS from multiple perspectives to make a case for its use.

Researchers used computer modeling to provide the first global and high-resolution analysis of the potential and costs for SPHS technology, proving it could be a long-term option to store renewable energy during times when it isn’t as readily available as peak times, Hunt said.

SPHS requires pumping water into a deep storage reservoir–which must be built parallel to a major river–during times of high water flow or low energy demand. If water is scarce or demand for energy increases, the reservoir can release stored water to generate electricity.

The analysis done by the IIAS team took a global approach to where and how to store energy and water seasonably using SPHS, as well as what the costs might be to implement solutions. Researchers used topographical, river network and hydrology data, infrastructure cost estimation, and project design optimization, to identify sites that could work for SPHS deployments.

The team hopes their findings will help promote the use of SPHS to help the world adopt renewable energy over traditional fossil fuels and other types of power that are releasing harmful emissions and depleting valuable resources from the earth, Hunt said.

Global energy player Total will build a battery-based energy storage project in France’s Dunkirk port district.

The battery project will be built with an investment of nearly €15m and will have 25MWh storage capacity and 25MW power output.

Total chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanné said: “This project is part of Total’s strategy to develop the stationary energy storage solutions that are critical to the expansion of renewable energy, which is intermittent by nature.

“It will contribute towards the goal of increasing the share of renewables in France’s energy mix while helping to stabilise the domestic power grid. Total’s involvement in the electricity segment continues to expand.

“With more than 40% allocated storage capacity, Total was the leading winner of the first call for tenders organised by RTE (France’s Electricity Transmission Network).

“This success was made possible thanks to the competencies of Total Flex, a renewable energy aggregation expert, and Saft, the European leader in batteries for energy storage.”

Scheduled for commissioning later this year, the new lithium-ion energy storage system is claimed to be the largest in France.

Towers of concrete blocks as tall as skyscrapers, a ski lift-like contraption on the side of a mountain, underground caverns — the quest for more ways to back up the increasing amount of wind and solar energy on the grid has recently driven investment toward a number of unusual technologies.

Now, the ability to serve a cleaner but more variable grid has become part of the pitch for a technology that has been around for decades but is still seeking commercialization: molten salt nuclear reactors, which have been promoted for years by investors like Bill Gates, who say that a new version of nuclear power is necessary to provide on-demand, carbon-free energy.

Developers of so-called “advanced reactors” — those that use designs fundamentally different from the light-water reactors that make up the existing U.S. power reactor fleet — want to combine a number of revenue streams into a package for potential customers. These uses include load-following to help the grid deal with intermittent renewable energy, the ability to provide power when not connected to external transmission lines (blackstart capability) and heat for industrial processes.

Advanced reactor developers believe these additional capabilities can provide an escape from the current situation facing the nuclear industry, which is struggling with high capital costs that have made the construction of new conventional power reactors extremely challenging in North America and Europe for the foreseeable future.

“We are innovating to solve what we believe is the biggest limit on new nuclear builds in the west — conventional technology is unaffordable and non-cost-competitive,” Simon Irish, CEO of advanced reactor developer Terrestrial Energy, told Utility Dive in an interview.

The molten salt reactor is just one type of nuclear design but, due to the ability of molten salt to contain and store heat at extremely high temperatures, proponents say it is particularly well-suited to the grid of the future.

According to the U.S. Energy Storage Association (ESA) and Wood Mackenzie, Q4 2019 marks the largest-ever quarter for storage deployments across all U.S. market segments.

It was a record quarter for power capacity with the U.S. deploying 186.4 MW and 364.2 MWh of energy storage.

Front-of-the-meter (FTM) installations appeared to growing faster than the behind-the-meter segment. The FTM market grew 160% in quarter-over-quarter growth, with 103.8 MW deployed in Q4 2019. The FTM market accounted for 56% of quarterly deployments, in MW terms, after two consecutive quarters in which it made up less than 50%, according to the report from ESA and WoodMac.

Because of PJM’s appetite for 1-hour duration storage in the Reg D regime, the growth on a megawatt-hour basis was slower than MW-based growth.

Kelly Speakes-Backman, ESA CEO, said in a release, “The electricity system of today and tomorrow relies on energy storage expansion, inclusion and integration. To accelerate its resilience, reliability and economic benefits, it is critical that federal lawmakers enact a standalone federal energy storage tax credit.”

Shutoffs and mandates driving California storage

Driven by California’s involuntary Public Safety Power Shutoffs and perhaps by the state’s solar mandate, California led the behind-the-meter (BTM) segment, while Massachusetts led the FTM rankings.

BNEF claims that customers installing solar are “willing to pay a premium to add storage for backup.” According to a recent report, BNEF expects 50,000 residential battery systems to be installed his year — up from the 19,000 California homes that had batteries in 2019.

According to the ESA report, the residential storage market saw another strong quarter, with 40.4 MW installed in Q4 2019. The non-residential BTM sector recorded its second-strongest quarter on record, with 42.2 MW deployed.

“The BTM segment had a banner year,” said Brett Simon, WoodMac senior analyst. “California continues to be a market to watch and we expect almost one in four residential solar systems across the state to have storage attached in 2020.

The latest quarterly US Energy Storage Monitor, produced by the national Energy Storage Association and analysis firm Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, has predicted annual deployments will reach 7.3GW by 2025.

A more than 14-fold increase is forecast, from 523MW recorded in 2019, with the “sharp scale-ups” both regionally and nationally to be driven primarily by a combination of “utility procurements and the accelerating residential market,” the report claims.

Over the next two years alone, the first really big utility procurements of energy storage are set to come online, causing an expected trebling of the market volume this year and then more than doubling again in 2021.

While supply constraints noted in the front-of-meter (utility grid-connected) market are pushing some projects back from the beginning of this year to 2021 or later, even during the period that these delays were beginning to be experienced, “the scale of planned large-scale system planning has surged,” according to Wood Mackenzie analysts.

“The U.S. energy storage market has shown rapid growth over the past decade, moving from pilot to commercial scale, but perhaps most remarkable is the geographic breadth and diversity of its success,” the report said, adding that energy storage is proving a range of services nationwide that shows it has “found a foothold”.

7.2GW annual market roughly equates to US$7.2 billion
These services include grid-level storage delivering ancillary services in territories including the New England ISO system operator service area, PJM Interconnection, Texas’ ERCOT, CAISO in California and others. Meanwhile, storage paired with solar is on the increase, as is the deployment of energy storage in lieu of more expensive transmission and distribution network upgrades.