Order 841 directed the regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and independent system operators (ISOs) that run the country’s wholesale electricity markets to craft new rules to allow storage resources to bid their services into the markets. Energy storage has already been quickly growing, in large part due to declines in the costs of lithium-ion batteries that can store generated electricity and deploy it at other times, and the storage industry has expected a boost from Order 841 since it will provide new revenue streams for the services storage can provide.

In their brief, the attorneys general also claim that wholesale market barriers have been holding back the growth of storage, but that Order 841 and its companion Order 841-A “provide a requirement for market design that will bolster investor confidence and encourage development of storage resources.”

Storage has the unique ability to inject energy back into the grid when it is most valuable, and thus is “essential” to state goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by building more renewable energy that is not available at certain times, the brief said. It cited a Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources study that found that an “optimal” amount of energy storage deployed in that state by 2020 would lead to $3.4 billion in economic, health and environmental benefits over ten years due to reduced electricity prices, reduced demand, deferred transmission infrastructure investment and a reduced need to run peaking power plants.

But NARUC and other groups mounting the challenge see FERC’s order as an infringement on state authority because it goes beyond the realm of the transmission system, of which FERC is one of the primary regulators, into the distribution system, which is typically controlled by local utilities. “A substantial, real-world burden… would be placed on distribution utilities if they were required to allow storage resources connected to their local distribution facilities or behind the retail meter… to participate in wholesale markets administered” by RTOs and ISOs, according to a brief filed by the Transmission Access Policy Study Group (TAPS), a trade association representing municipal utilities, municipal joint action agencies, electric cooperatives and an investor-owned utility.

For example, distributed storage resources, like batteries deployed at customer homes or businesses, produce two-way flows of power since batteries both deploy stored power to the grid and consume electricity from the grid. Therefore, they can lead to large costs for utilities if their distribution systems are not designed to handle those bidirectional power flows, according to the brief from TAPS. On top of those costs, the utilities would also need to develop modeling and forecasting tools to accommodate the sales of electricity from those distributed resources to the wholesale markets.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra co-led a coalition of five attorneys general and the California Air Resources Board in filing an amicus brief urging a federal appeals court to uphold orders by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that will allow energy storage resources to fully participate and compete in the wholesale energy market, aiding states in their transitions to cleaner, more reliable, and more resilient power systems.

“Increasing the role that energy storage resources play in our markets will help lower electricity bills, reduce pollution, and support our thriving $14 billion clean energy economy in Massachusetts,” AG Healey said. “We urge the court to uphold FERC’s orders so states can build on these investments and accelerate the essential transition to an energy system without dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Here in California, we believe in tearing down barriers – not building new ones,” said AG Becerra. “Removing unnecessary barriers to entry into the wholesale electric market will increase competition, lower prices, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, and FERC’s orders will provide much-needed benefits to both consumers and the environment.”

The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, et al. v FERC, urges the court to uphold FERC’s orders, which require administrators of regional, wholesale electricity markets, including ISO-New England, to adopt rules that allow storage resources to fully participate in the competitive electricity market. The brief argues that the orders will enhance the substantial environmental, economic, and health-related benefits that energy storage technology, including battery storage, provides to Massachusetts and other states.

According to the brief, energy storage resources provide important benefits to states and their consumers by storing excess generated electricity for later use and injecting power back onto the system when needed, including when customer demand and electricity prices are high. This capability allows storage resources to help states lower electricity bills, create cleaner, more flexible and reliable power systems, and reduce the need for expensive and highly polluting energy generators that run on dirty fuels such as oil, diesel, and coal. In Massachusetts alone, energy storage could provide up to $3.4 billion in savings and revenues over the next ten years. By facilitating the transition to cleaner energy, storage resources help states address the climate crisis and improve air quality.

The brief also urges the court to uphold the orders based on an appropriate and well-established understanding of FERC’s limited statutory authority under the Federal Power Act.

The brief demonstrates AG Healey’s continued commitment to ensuring access to clean electricity at reasonable prices for all Massachusetts consumers and to working with other state attorneys general to advocate for renewable energy and fight dangerous climate change.

While energy storage system (ESS) batteries are often described as stationary storage to distinguish them from batteries used in automotive applications, a new partnership in Europe turns containerised ESS into mobile power sources.

GreenChoice, a renewable energy retailer headquartered in the Netherlands, is developing ESS battery ‘docks’ along with German engineering startup Greener Engineering. GreenChoice’s wind farms will be used to charge the latter company’s containerised battery energy storage units with electricity.

Those batteries can then be “wheeled” over to customers that need a mobile or emergency power source. Greener Power Solutions co-founder Dieter Castelein previously wrote a technical paper for PV Tech Power (reproduced here in full on the Energy-Storage.news site) about how mobile energy storage units can be used to “take-over” grid functions when grids need maintenance.

Greener also provides energy storage to outdoor events including popular dance music festivals in Europe, providing a cleaner alternative to diesel generators that have long been necessary for such occasions where there is no grid connection to get power directly from. The engineering company told Energy-Storage.news today that the partnership with GreenChoice now gives both provider and customer an option to do this with renewable wind power.

“If a festival or construction site needs an energy solution, we can provide a battery. And when the battery is empty, we can quickly replace it with a battery that is recharged with wind energy,” Dieter Castelein said.

For the latest project, 10 mobile systems of uniform size with a total capacity of 3,360kWh form the charging station. Batteries themselves come from Greener’s partnership with provider Alfen.

They can charge from GreenChoice’s Hellegatsplein wind farm in just 43 minutes and are used on a day-to-day basis to help regulate frequency of the grid by matching imbalances in supply and demand. It’s also GreenChoice’s second large-scale battery deployed at one of its wind farms, after a 10MWh battery was installed at Hartelkanaal wind power station near Rotterdam last year.

As readers of Energy-Storage.news are no doubt well aware, the United States energy storage market is achieving rapid growth.

As analysts project a thirteen-fold increase for the category over the next six years reaching 158 gigawatt-hours by 2024, there is now significant demand for battery manufacturing capacity in the U.S. This is true for the entire category, but especially so for industrial scale applications, as evidenced by utility-scale storage representing the largest market segment in 2018 at 394.8MWh, and experiencing double-digit growth of 11.3% year-over-year.

Many expect there to be continued growth and viability of industrial-scale batteries that are capable of powering energy storage systems. These solutions include those that sit predominantly in front of the meter, supporting utility-scale electricity generation, transmission and storage.

This technology can replace fossil fuel peaker plants, enhance wind and solar plus storage projects, optimise microgrids, improve the utility’s ability to meet fluctuating demand, manage power disruptions – and be deployed in commercial, industrial, mining and military projects.

It is a common misconception that “the technology isn’t there yet,” as most industry insiders will tell you that many of the hurdles to mass adoption of industrial energy storage relate to a lack of supply. Across the current landscape, many energy storage supply chains are bottle necked and wracked with costly inefficiencies that delay the process of production to delivery. While there are a number of international companies shipping product that has helped spur this sector’s growth, domestic manufacturing would help the U.S. meet battery demand with batteries made in the U.S.

The overall global energy storage was at 4.2GW in 2019. It would be witnessing a steady, strong growth in 2020 as well, with an estimated capacity of above 6GW.

Energy storage is gaining importance with increasing demand for energy in residential and industrial applications. With growing data consumption and a proliferation of cloud services, the demand for energy increases proportionately. Energy storage is a viable solution to utilize renewable energy and an attractive option for implementing clean energy sources.

Key countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Germany, Japan, South Korea, India, and the UAE have set a target to achieve significant power generation through clean energy sources. Most governments have come up with supportive legislative policies, regulations, and incentives that drive energy storage installations.

Battery Energy Storage Solution (BESS) is a strong segment, along with the Thermal Energy Storage (TES) system. Within BESS, lithium-ion (Li-ion) is the most widely used storage solution, followed by flow batteries and sodium-sulfur (NaS) batteries.

South Korea was the global leader in energy storage solutions in 2018. However, in 2019, the United States surpassed South Korea and became the global market leader.

Growth in 2020 will be largely determined by the demand in the United States, China, and South Korea followed by other key countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and UAE.

Among end-user categories, residential-scale storage is witnessing significant growth, exceeding commercial and utility, while utility-scale storage is also gaining momentum alongside commercial/industrial applications. Residential scale storage is predominantly dependent on BESS, while commercial and utility-scale storage uses both BESS and other alternative storage solutions.

Steady price decline of Li-ion batteries is an important factor that drives the demand for residential energy storage systems, along with the concept of solar + storage, where solar panels installed at residential dwellings prefer to have a storage unit as well for use during peak hours of the day and during peak summer and winter when the grid lines could not cater to the surging energy demand.

Ice Energy filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in December, in a setback for small-scale thermal energy storage.

As lithium-ion batteries proliferated for grid storage, a small contingent of entrepreneurs pitched an alternative technology: thermal storage, which preheats or precools a building to cut electrical usage during expensive peak hours. The technology is simple and cheap and has helped large commercial buildings for years. Ice Energy wanted to extend it to small businesses and homes.

It won several utility contracts to help reduce peak demand by installing Ice Bear devices on commercial customer sites, expanding into the residential market with its smaller Ice Cub product.

Ice Energy filed for bankruptcy with the Central District of California on December 17; the filing scheduled a meeting of creditors for January 27. The document offers few other details about the circumstances.

The company’s website is no longer active, and COO Marcel Christians did not respond to a call for comment.

Chapter 7 means the company will liquidate its assets rather than trying to reconstitute and exit bankruptcy. That’s an abrupt change of fortune for a company that had a clear path ahead of it, with a plan to execute on contracts it had already won with creditworthy utilities.

A part from driving a clean transportation revolution over the next three decades, electric vehicles (EVs) could help the power grid’s storage needs as growing shares of renewable energy sources—predominantly solar and wind—are being incorporated into electricity grids.

Batteries from EVs could have so much more potential energy storage by 2050 that electric cars could be the ones to boost the energy storage of the power grid to accommodate rising solar and wind capacity, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) says.

While electric vehicles and renewables may now look as two totally separate clean-energy technologies, and EVs are a strain on power grids when charging at peak electricity demand, there are potentially huge benefits to the power grid if EVs are plugged in to smart grids, IRENA experts say.

The EV fleet of the future could create vast electricity storage capacity, the agency says.

Future EV battery capacity may dwarf stationary battery capacity by 2050, experts at IRENA said in an analysis from last year. In 2050, around 14 terawatt-hours (TWh) of EV batteries would be available to provide grid services, compared to 9 TWh of stationary batteries, according to the agency.

“Smart charging for electric vehicles (EVs) holds the key to unleash synergies between clean transport sector and low-carbon electricity. It minimises the load impact from EVs and unlocks the flexibility to use more solar and wind power,” IRENA said.

Smart charging, unlike uncontrolled charging, also decreases simultaneity and lowers peaks in demand.

In addition, smart charging of EVs has the potential to significantly cut the peak load and avoid grid reinforcements, at a cost of 10 percent of the total cost of reinforcing the grid, according to IRENA’s experts.

In the key forms of advanced EV charging, in V2H/B (vehicle to home/building), vehicles could act as supplement power suppliers to the home, while in V2G (Vehicle-to-grid), the smart grid controls vehicle charging and returns electricity to the grid.

Adjusting charging patterns, considering that EVs currently are idle in parking for 90–95 percent of the time for most cars, could contribute to both system and local flexibility, IRENA says.

The continued growth of renewables in the global energy mix is inextricably linked to grid level energy storage, which can smooth out the inherent intermittency of solar and wind generation, ensure that generated power is in the right place to meet demand and provide a range of other services to the grid.

While lithium-ion is the best-known storage technology today, a range of different battery technologies offers the potential to provide valuable services to electricity grids around the world, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

In a new paper, researchers at Tianjin University in China examine these battery technologies, providing a broad perspective on the state of battery technology for grid applications today, and offering a roadmap to guide future studies in this areas. Their findings are published in the paper Battery Technologies for Grid-Level Large-Sale Electrical Energy Storage, published in Transactions of Tianjin University.

The researchers identify three main roles for batteries to perform at grid level:

• Peak shaving & load leveling: To balance gaps in demand.
• Voltage and frequency regulation: To achieve a real time balance with non-uniform load on the grid
• Emergency energy storage: Providing back up power and preventing outages.
• The paper discusses the role of a wide range of existing battery technologies and their ability to provide these services safely and cost effectively, and the challenges that exist for each.

“Battery energy storage technologies with rapid response, low cost, long lifetime, high power, and energy efficiency can be distributed throughout the grid and therefore are desirable for utilization in grid-level electrical energy storage,” say the researchers. “However, some trade-offs often exist among different properties and no existing batteries can meet all the requirements.”

The paper offers analysis of battery technologies including lead-acid, nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride, sodium-sulfur, lithium-ion and flow batteries of various chemistries.

Three broad conclusions are drawn from this analysis – that research should move in the direction of novel battery systems aimed at meeting all the requirements of grid level energy storage, that cost efficiency requirements mean efforts should focus on batteries based on cheap, abundant materials – such as sodium-ion. And finally, that modelling and comparison between different battery technologies is vital in establishing the best option for a given use case.

With US$5.4B projected for U.S. storage investments by 2024 — a 12-fold increase in annual growth in less than five years — the trajectory for energy storage is clear. What’s also clear is that policymakers across the country see the value of encouraging this striking market growth with policies that enable expansion. What’s less clear is whether states or the federal government will take the lead in encouraging the integration of storage into the electric grid.

Energy storage is an increasingly important technology that serves myriad retail and wholesale services, and with robust economic, grid reliability, and climate benefits. So, is it at the state level where homes and businesses might need these resources to ensure resilient and clean power? Or is it at the Federal level where developers and utilities can reinforce the reliability and efficiency of electric wholesale services?

I posit that enabling policies are needed at both the Federal and the State level. But challenges loom large at the Federal level this year.

StorageITC is a missed opportunity, but not gone

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has been integral in pushing for the adoption of energy storage deployment with Order 841, and just a few weeks ago the Department of Energy issued the Energy Storage Grand Challenge. But Congress missed a big opportunity this past December. Despite broad, bipartisan and bicameral support, federal lawmakers ultimately took a pass on legislation to clarify that the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) should include stand-alone energy storage.

Even with the challenges of an election coming up in November, we will keep fighting to make sure this common sense, jobs- and economic growth-enabling energy policy ultimately prevails this year. A number of additional technology innovation bills that encourage storage are also working their way through Congress, and we look forward to doing what we can to help make them into law. But even though energy storage policy enjoys bipartisan support, there are obvious challenges associated in an election year in a deeply divided congress.