There could be 10 guiding principles for integrating energy storage as a vital “pillar” of the energy transition, a private members’ and stakeholders’ meeting by Bundersverband Energiespeicher (BVES), a national trade organisation in Germany has proposed.

Valeska Gottke, communications and markets representative for BVES, told Energy-Storage.news that the overall strategy and concept are still going through further development, refinement and discussion and will likely not be published in full until after the Energy Storage Europe trade event taking place in Dusseldorf, Germany, in mid-march.

Nonetheless, Gottke said, it was clear to attendees at the BVES ‘conclave’ event held in Dresden this week that the energy storage industry should have a “natural interest in applying energy storage systems to receive energy [reliably] from climate-friendly sources”.

It should also be recognised that as a set of technologies that can aid with and enable system-wide integration of resources, energy storage systems (ESS) are “‘connectors that bring flexibility to every system,” Gottke said.

On the clear understanding that it therefore remains a work in progress and should be considered in this way, BVES shared 10 guiding principles that could or should help integrate energy storage as the “fourth pillar” of the energy transition (known in Germany as ‘Energiewende’). The other three pillars are the production, consumption and transport of energy.

Germany’s energy system in 2030 should be “decarbonised, safe and secure”, BVES said in its statement on those 10 principles, which, in brief, are as follows:

1. Germany’s EEG, the surcharge payments through which the country, including the general public via a line on their energy bills, pays for green energy policies, should no longer be the “main legal basis” for the energy system by 2030, as it is now.
2. A definitive pricing system for CO2 should be applied, in all sectors, on a strict “polluter pays” principle.
3. Energy storage should be recognised as the fourth pillar of the energy transition.
4. There needs to be better “transparency” or cross-sector unification between the electricity, mobility and heat sectors. Attendees at previous Energy Storage Europe shows – or indeed readers of Energy-Storage.news’ coverage – will be aware that this ‘sector coupling’ principle has been discussed at a high level for a while now, far in advance of that seen in most other markets.

Building on a successful and uncharacteristically transparent third quarter, Tesla has reported even greater installation figures across solar and storage.

The company installed 530 MWh of energy storage in Q4 2019, beating out last quarter’s record mark of 477 MWh by 11% and delivering on Q3’s expectation that that record would be short-lived.

Tesla also installed 54 MW of solar in Q4, up 26% from Q3’s 43 MW and the highest mark since Q4 of 2018, when 73 MW were installed. Year-over-year, storage installations are up 126%, while overall solar installations are down 26%. To add further perspective, the company deployed 93 MW of solar in Q3 2018, so while the rebound is speeding up, the company has not quite caught up to where it was.

The early portion of the call was dominated by Elon Musk’s admiration for the Tesla Cybertruck, saying that, in regards to demand for the vehicle, “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Musk also shared that the company is seeing “exponential demand” in regards to how the California home solar mandate is affecting solar roof sales prospects, though he did follow that up by saying that it’s difficult to estimate figures.

“It’s the future we want”

The company also shared that it’s hiring at the Buffalo Gigafactory, which produces the solar roof tiles. Outside of excitement, there was little said about the solar roof, with the report focusing on Tesla’s efforts to partner with roofing companies, allowing them to perform the installation.

Energy storage was not the only sector where Tesla broke newly-set records. The company delivered 112,000 vehicles in Q4, beating the previous record of 97,000 set in Q3 2019 by 14%. In fact, demand was so high that finished vehicle inventory levels reached just 11 days of sales at the end of Q4, meaning demand is closer to supply than it has ever been. The company also shared that it is already expanding its Shanghai Gigafactory, as Model Y demand projections continue to grow.

AGL Energy has signed a 15-year agreement to purchase power from a 100MW Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) to be built at Wandoan, Queensland, Australia.

The company signed the agreement with Vena Energy Australia, which will build, own and maintain the BESS.

AGL will have full operational dispatch rights over the Wandoan facility.

The project is expected to create 30 jobs. Once complete, the lithium-ion battery will be one of the largest in the country.

The BESS will have the capacity to store 150MW/h of energy that can power up to 57,000 average homes.

Vena Energy CEO Nitin Apte said: “The BESS is a major milestone in the continuing modernisation of Queensland’s energy supply and improves the reliability of the power grid.

“The project will bolster a positive investment environment for future projects, as well as encourage broader adoption of renewable energy in Queensland and in Australia.”

The deal is aligned with AGL’s strategy to support the development of flexible energy storage systems, encouraging renewable energy usage.

AGL CEO Brett Redman said: “With the signing of the agreement, work on the BESS will commence and is scheduled to take about 18 months.

“The BESS will enable AGL to leverage excess solar generation in Queensland and provide capacity when the Coopers Gap Wind Farm and other renewable power sources are not generating.”

In October 2019, AGL entered a similar agreement to buy power from four 50MW /100 MW/h batteries in New South Wales, Australia.

“We almost doubled last year, we’re on track to double here again in 2019 and projections show that we are looking to triple in 2020,” Kelly SpeakesBackman, US Energy Storage Association (ESA) CEO, says.

“That’s the state of where we are,” the trade group chief adds, explaining that ESA represents all forms of energy storage, “not just lithium-ion”. Her home country’s energy storage industry is enjoying a rare degree of what she calls “extremely strong, bipartisan support,” from Congress and the Department of Energy to other administrations including the Department of Commerce.

’An efficient, affordable and sustainable grid’
This support comes because there’s a growing recognition, Speakes-Backman says, that energy storage – batteries or otherwise – is a help, not a hindrance to the grid.

“Energy storage is certainly there to integrate intermittent resources like solar and wind and help enable our grid to get cleaner, but it’s also there for grid operators to improve the efficiency of the grid, to improve resilience.

“We are there for an efficient, affordable and sustainable grid. It’s all of those things. That’s part of the reason why we’re enjoying such strong support. It’s being embodied through tremendous growth.”

Now based in Washington DC, Maryland native Speakes-Backman became CEO at the ESA in mid-2017, representing its 180 member organisations along the value chain from electric utilities to financiers, manufacturers and component suppliers at events and in the corridors of power.

Fast-moving tech vs incumbent frameworks
A former Maryland Public Service Commissioner in the early 2010s, Speakes-Backman understands the pressures that those coordinating electricity networks face. She says that educating stakeholders remains a crucial part of ESA’s work.

“By that (‘stakeholders’) I mean decision makers like big commissioners, federal commissioners, independent system operators, utilities who are part of our membership, helping people understand what storage is, and what it isn’t.

“As much as we’re an enabling technology, we’re disruptive to the regulatory frameworks that exist both at the federal level and at the state level. We’re not necessarily generation, not necessarily transmission, we’re not really distribution but we can be all of those things in a single asset and that’s different than what typically been considered in long-term planning. So, it is disruptive.”

The world’s largest asset manager has a new multibillion-dollar renewable energy fund in the works, and a good chunk of it may go to batteries.

Long a major global investor in wind and solar energy, BlackRock has more recently begun buying into energy storage projects — including its acquisition last year of GE’s distributed solar and storage business.

Looking out over the next few years, energy storage is one market “where we’ll see the opportunity set expand,” said Martin Torres, head of the Americas at the renewables group within BlackRock Real Assets.

Torres and his team are also “eagerly watching” the emergence of the U.S. offshore wind market, he told GTM.

A transformed investment landscape
BlackRock shook the financial universe this month when CEO Larry Fink said the company will put sustainability at the “center” of its investment approach.

Exactly what Fink’s announcement will mean for BlackRock’s fossil fuel investments remains to be seen. But in the realm of renewables, at least, BlackRock’s green bona fides need little burnishing.

BlackRock launched its first equity fund targeting renewables in 2011; since then it’s played a major role in convincing institutional investors — think pension plans, insurance companies and endowments — to look at wind and solar like they would any other infrastructure asset: boring, safe, predictably lucrative.

Since 2011, BlackRock claims to have channeled $5.5 billion into more than 250 wind and solar projects around the world, a fleet that generates enough power to keep the lights on in Spain. And its appetite for renewables investment keeps growing.

BlackRock’s first renewables private-equity fund drew around $600 million of commitments from big investors. The second, launched a few years later, brought in $1.65 billion.

With its third “vintage,” known as the Global Renewable Power III fund (GRP III), BlackRock is targeting $2.5 billion of commitments; in December it announced a record $1 billion “first close,” meaning the fund can begin making investments even as it continues to bring in more capital.

A growing number of U.S. utilities plan to add energy storage to their resource plans this decade, as declining renewable energy costs and investor and public pressure to curb emissions have significantly changed the market over the past few years.

More and more utilities across the United States plan to add more wind and solar capacity and retire coal-fired power plants to start addressing climate change and to take advantage of falling renewable energy procurement costs. And a growing number of those utilities are combining battery energy storage with their new solar and wind capacity plans.

The utilities’ integrated resource plans (IRPs) for the next few years include significant growth in battery energy storage. Battery storage deployments are even expected to exceed the utilities’ expectations in their IRPs, according to a new analysis by Wood Mackenzie.

The energy consultancy’s analysis of the plans of 43 utilities showed “exponential growth in expected utility demand for battery energy storage system procurements, as utilities adopt more aggressive clean energy portfolio strategies,” WoodMac says.

Last year was a crucial year in battery energy storage plans as the utilities with plans to add energy storage increased their combined expected storage deployment five times compared to the 2018 plans, WoodMac’s analysis showed, as carried by Greentech Media.

Currently, utilities in the United States expect 6.3 gigawatts (GW) of battery deployment this decade.

Utilities are starting to move from pilot projects to wider deployment of battery energy storage because they gain experience with the technology, according to Wood Mackenzie’s storage researcher Gregson Curtin.

“Once utilities test energy storage and like it, they keep procuring more and more,” Curtin tells Greentech Media, a unit of Wood Mackenzie.

As the global economy attempts to further distance itself from fossil fuels, renewable sources of energy are receiving increasing attention.

Yet for all the potential of green energy sources – be it solar or wind power – there remains the unavoidable problem of intermittency. Wind power generation is contingent on windy conditions, just as solar is reliant on it being sunny, meaning predictable energy generation is never a given.

In order to ensure the grid has enough energy in its system – and avoids blackouts – long-term energy storage is required. Only then will there be enough power to keep the lights on in the event of a sunless or still day.

While traditional lithium ion batteries are able to store energy for short amounts of time, they are insufficient when it comes to long-term energy storage. And while there is evidence to suggest pumped hydro-storage might be able to store energy for longer periods, with large generation capacities, it remains incompatible with grids with smaller demand.

However, a new paper to come out of the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) has proposed a new concept that could be the answer to the storage service question. And the system is based upon that most awe-inspiring of topographical features: the mountain.

Going off-piste: introducing MGES
Known as mountain gravity energy storage (MGES), the technology works by simply transporting sand or gravel from a lower storage site to an upper elevation, storing potential energy from the upward journey and releasing it on the way back down. The higher the height, the greater the amount of stored energy, claims the research.

The paper’s writer is Julian Hunt, who headed up the IIASA team of researchers. It also proposes that MGES could be combined with hydropower in the case of river streams on a summit, whereby water, in periods of high availability, could replace sand and gravel in the storage vessels.

Yet, the concept of gravitational energy is not entirely new, says Hunt, who has published previous papers on its potential. He also alludes to an attempt by Bill Gates back in 2012 to create an energy storage system by transporting gravel on ski lifts. The project was later abandoned.

NextEra Energy signaled a strong quarter and year judging by the stock’s greater than 50% rise over the past twelve months.

For the full year of 2019, the company’s GAAP net income was $3.8 billion. NextEra Energy Resources, a group within the company that owns a majority of its renewable resources, earned just under $1.7 billion on the year. The company’s broader financial results can be found on its investor page.

The company commissioned 2.7 GW of renewable energy capacity including 700 MWac of solar power and 340 MW/~1.3 GWh of energy storage. In Florida, the company brought on 300 MWac of solar under its utility Florida Power & Light. That subsidiary of NextEra also noted that in 2020, it will deploy the first 750 MWac of its “10 GWac by 2030 goal,” and that it had secured the sites needed to build out those facilities.

5.8 GWac of future capacity was originated in the year, which included 900 MW/~3.6 GWh of energy storage. Of that newly originated solar volume, 50% of it included a battery storage component. The company also noted that more than 2 GW of that future capacity were “trifecta projects that combine wind, solar and battery storage together.”

CEO Jim Robo noted;

We continue to expect that by the middle of this decade, without incentives, new near-firm wind is going to be a $20 to $30 per megawatt hour product, and new near-firm solar is going to be a $30 to $40 per megawatt-hour product. At these prices, new near-firm renewables will be cheaper than the operating cost of most existing coal, nuclear, and less efficient oil and gas-fired generation units.

The terminology “near firm” means the plants will have some form of energy storage included in those prices. The company said it “increasingly sees storage as an important standalone business in its own right, as we are reviewing a number of opportunities to add storage to our existing solar sites to take advantage of the ITC and enhance the value of our existing projects for customers.”

US construction and home improvement company PetersenDean has selected Enphase’s equipment including battery storage for its solar home offerings, with a particular emphasis on California’s Home Solar Mandate.

Enphase will be the contractor’s “premier supplier”, the tech company said. While originally best known for its panel-level microinverters, Enphase’s “all-in-one smart energy system” now includes the solar microinverters along with battery storage and an energy management suite.

The battery energy storage systems are available in 3.4kWh and 10.1kWh usable capacities and are scalable to larger sizes, coming with 10-year limited warranties, while the microinverters have a 25-year warranty in line with solar system lifetime expectations.

Branded Encharge 3 and Encharge 10 respectively, the company opened pre-orders for the batteries in November last year at the height of conversation around California’s power line shut-offs in the wake of wildfires. Enphase said the microinverters are grid-forming and have an Always-On setting to allow homeowners to keep appliances running even when grid power is not.

As of the beginning of this year, California’s various existing policy measures to drive forward solar adoption in the state including the Self-Generation Incentive Programme (SGIP) were joined by the mandate, the first in the US to be introduced at state level.

Part of the building codes, solar installation company EnergySage recently wrote on its company blog that new homes constructed this year require the addition of a solar photovoltaic (PV) system as an electricity source, and should be sized adequately to meet the building’s annual electricity consumption. EnergySage noted that the addition of battery energy storage can somewhat reduce the sizing requirement – by as much as 25% in some cases as the batteries help to meet the required load.

While PetersenDean and Enphase are rolling out the systems in nine US states in total, Enphase president and CEO Badri Kothandaram referred directly to the importance of the California Home Solar Mandate in a statement.

When designing a house, one of the most important issues is energy efficiency. That means there needs to be the right amount of insulation in the foundation, walls and roof, energy efficient windows, and well placed on the periphery of the house. The house also should be placed on the property for optimal solar orientation. With these factors covered, the house will require minimal energy for heating and cooling.

A perfect solution for efficiently providing the energy for electricity is to install photovoltaic (PV) solar panels on the roof or next to the house. The house can get energy from the grid when there is no sun or inclement weather and feed energy back to the grid where this is allowed.

Some houses are totally off the grid because connecting to the grid would be too expensive or unavailable in that area. These houses require photo voltaic (PV) panels to provide energy and batteries to store the energy for periods when there is no solar energy and/or inclement weather. When a household stores solar energy produced on site and uses that energy when solar production is less than than the energy requirements in the house – it is called “self consumption.”

The house may also be connected to the grid and return excess energy to the grid when the battery is full or during peak periods of the day when the grid is overloaded.

I interviewed Lior Handelsman, VP of Marketing & Product Strategy and Founder of SolarEdge, a global leader in smart energy technology to get very up-to-date information on solar energy. The interview with Handelsman follows: