To ensure we deliver a compelling, relevant, and actionable conference experience this February, the Intersolar North America team has been watching how the solar, energy storage, and e-mobility industries evolved over the past year. Dive into the top trends shaping each of these markets below.

Solar Trends to Look Forward To
Analysts predicted that the global solar market would surpass 100 gigawatts (GW) in 2019. 2.7 gigawatts of solar were installed in the first quarter, which made it the quarter with the most solar ever installed in US history. Recent growth has been driven in part by the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which was decreased at the end of 2019 and motivated companies to close deals prior to the deadline.

Corporate procurement and renewable energy commitments from companies like Google and Apple continued to surprise market analysts as a major market growth driver in 2019. Corporate procurements made up nearly 25% of 2018’s projects and are expected to have made up 17% of projects in 2019.

In the past decade, US solar has grown from 25 GW to an estimated 663 GW by the end of 2019. According to BloombergNEF, that’s enough to power nearly 100 million homes in the US.

Looking Ahead

With carbon-based electric generation contributing approximately 30% to the US’s total greenhouse gas emissions, there’s a major opportunity to decarbonize the energy sector with renewables. In the 2020s, state, municipal, and corporate procurement will continue to drive market expansion as more cities announce renewable energy goals and the cost of solar continues to drop.

Energy Storage Trends that are Driving Innovation
The decline in battery technology costs is driving market growth for the energy storage industry in 2019, with lithium prices expected to fall 45% by 2021.

In Q1 of 2019, the market achieved a record-breaking 232% growth. Part of that growth can be attributed to a surge in residential storage in 2018, with deployments quadrupling year-after-year due to the increase in state-level incentive programs for solar-plus-storage projects. Despite recent residential market growth, utility-supply storage continues to stand as the largest market segment. According to SEPA, investor-owned utilities deployed the most storage of any utility type, contributing approximately 64% of megawatt-hours interconnected to the grid last year.

Portugal is already speeding up work to follow its record-breaking solar auction of 2019 with a fresh tender this year, with a tentative launch date now set towards the end of Q1 2020.

Recently contacted by Energy-Storage.news’ sister site PV Tech, the country’s Environment and Climate Action Ministry said it expects this year’s PV tender to get underway “by the end of March 2020”.

Asked about a potential separate storage tender – a move the government had discussed last year – a Ministry spokesperson said these technologies will be incorporated to the PV auction.

“A new bidding option shall be provided [under the solar tender] to promoters who wish to deploy a storage technology,” the spokesperson explained.

To read the full version of this story, visit PV Tech.

The auction’s tentative date of late March 2020 places it right alongside Solar Media’s Large Scale Solar Europe 2020 (Lisbon, 31 March-1 April 2020), which will delve into Portugal’s plans to drive a solar boom.

Companies selling batteries of any sort to businesses grapple with the fact that the devices are expensive, take up valuable space and tend to require a painful and lengthy sales cycle.

Those downsides can get in the way of the appeal, which is to save companies loads of money on their electricity bills by dodging peaks and demand charges. As such, several commercial battery vendors have shifted their business models, but none have done so quite like Axiom Exergy.

The Bay Area startup launched in 2014 with the thesis that lithium-ion batteries made little sense for businesses with high thermal loads, like grocery stores, and that thermal storage could optimize cooling and slash bills for considerably less upfront investment.

The company got a few initial “refrigeration batteries” into stores, including Whole Foods and Walmart. Along the way, it built a software platform that tapped into existing refrigeration systems’ data collection in order to predict upcoming peaks and front-load cooling sessions accordingly.

Then something unexpected happened, said co-founder and CEO Amrit Robbins in an interview Monday. “We were really blown away by the results,” he said. “Customers asked to deploy the software without the hardware.”

Instead of convincing building energy managers and their bosses to hand over square footage to a tank of salt water, the software makes a much simpler pitch. Refrigeration controllers already collect hundreds of data streams, but they typically only get used if something goes wrong and triggers a manual inspection, Robbins said. The logs get wiped every couple of weeks to make room for more under-utilized data.

Axiom simply inserts a small computer box into the existing refrigeration controller, then feeds the data stream into an AI algorithm alongside relevant information, such as weather and utility rates, and uses its analysis to ramp cooling up or down to minimize the customer’s bill. It calls this Axiom Cloud, and the company has contracted more than $1 million in bookings over the last few months, Robbins said; he hopes to have 100 sites in operation by the end of this year.

The shift from hardware-centric to software-centric sales dramatically lowered Axiom’s cost of goods sold, sped up the sales cycle and generated recurring subscription revenues. Those are all things that venture investors like to see, which should please Axiom backers including Shell Ventures, GXP Investments (now Evergy Ventures) and former Tesla CTO JB Straubel.

Generac’s generously proportioned home system
US residential back-up system provider Generac claims that the modules in its new battery energy storage devices offer the “highest storage capacity available on the market today”.

The company launched its new system PWRcell and its PWRview control and monitoring app in 2019, pitching both to the US industry at last September’s Solar Power International / Energy Storage International show.

At the beginning of this week, Generac said the products are now available to buy through the company’s installer network. It claims that users can realise “thousands of dollars of savings over the life of the product” through charging the battery with solar-generated or off-peak energy, in order to ride out peak demand times.

It comes with a 10-year limited warranty, also offers back-up power and is available in modular blocks from 8.6kWh up to 34.2kWh. The company claims that this outdoes the likes of Sonnenbatterie Eco, Tesla’s Powerwall and LG Chem RESU systems for modular capacity.

In related news, Generac acquired solar inverter manufacturer Pika in mid-2019.

EV player SERES spins out battery division
Automotive technology company SERES (SF Motors Inc), has completed the spin-out of its in-house Battery Technology Division into a new entity, TeraWatt Technology Inc.

Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, SERES currently produces two models of electric vehicle (EV) and has R&D centres in Japan and in Michigan; e-powertrain manufacturing and EV manufacturing sites at two separate locations in China; as well as a new product lab and an EV assembly plant in the US.

Established as a subsidiary in 2017, TeraWatt describes itself as a firm that engineers “ultra-high density lithium-ion batteries that work” and in August 2019 launched a 4.5Ah prototype solid-state battery design with a third-party validated energy density of 432Wh per kg, and expected to be available to “select early adopters in 2021 and full release in 2022”.

Battery storage systems increase the reliability and efficiency of renewable power resources like wind farms and solar panels by banking energy for later use. U.S. utilities are signing an increased volume of contracts for battery-based energy storage, either as part of their own sustainability goals or under the green power mandates of the states in which they operate. As of February 2019, a total of seven states had policies in place that require a certain amount of battery storage to be built.

Homeowners are also looking to battery storage to fulfill power needs, particularly in regions that have been threatened with blackouts, like California.

The AES Corporation (NYSE:AES), General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), and Vivint Solar (NYSE:VSLR) stand out in the space, even in the face of competition from big players like Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) and NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE) because they are approaching the sector with an eye on contracts that will provide a steady, long-term revenue stream. Investing in one of these companies could represent an opportunity for investors looking to get in on the renewable energy boom. Here’s a look at what all three are doing to position themselves for gains.

AES: a proven partner for utilities
AES’s distributed energy unit has been developing solar and solar-plus-storage projects since 2009. The company has more than 150 MW of operating projects throughout the U.S. and more than 300 MW of additional projects in development and under construction.

The company has developed storage projects on its own and through Fluence, a partnership with the German industrial conglomerate Siemens. An example of one of the company’s contracts is its 100 MW AES Southland battery in Southern California. The project was awarded a 20-year power purchase agreement as part of a $2 billion repowering program that will replace gas-fired plants with more efficient technology.

GE: developing larger-scale projects
GE has had a few stops and starts in its development of battery storage but has seen recent success with its Reservoir systems, including a key win in Australia. After securing contracts to install batteries sized at 30 MW or less in California and Ontario, the company recently landed a deal to deliver a 100 MW project that will accompany the 200 MW Solar River plant north of Adelaide, South Australia. The battery is expected to be up and running in 2021.

Vivint Solar: a smaller player with an innovative contract
Vivint Solar is included on the list with more established players in the U.S. power generation business because it has designed something innovative that responds to a growing market need and is likely to increase revenue over the long-term.

Utilities have started asking developers to build solar energy projects and install a storage component at the same time, rather than add storage to existing projects. These solar-plus-storage projects have come online in Hawaii and California. Vivint is taking the concept to the residential solar market, having launched a contract structure that will enable homeowners to pay one rate for solar and battery storage in California. The battery can be used during power outages and during peak demand hours when utility rates are highest. Vivint typically offers installation of residential solar panels with no up-front cost to the customer in exchange for a 20-year contract to sell power to the property owner.

Ørsted has appointed REMAP as its marketing agent for its flexible generation and revenue optimisation services in the UK.

REMAP has been granted a license to use insights from Ørsted’s Balancing Mechanism algorithm to provide project development support to third party developers and asset owners.

This access gives REMAP the capability to provide revenue modelling for storage assets. The partnership between Ørsted and REMAP offers developers end-to-end project support, from project design through the procurement, contracting and financing stage and during ongoing operations.

The UK’s flexible generation sector has the potential for “significant growth” but is currently being held back by “lack of certainty of revenues and a mature route to market”, Kyle Worthington, head of power origination at Ørsted, said.

“We believe that projects can support unsubsidised revenue strategies, but we also recognise that assistance is needed at an early-stage in order to build a financeable business case.”

Partnerships to optimise storage assets across several revenue streams are becoming more common in the UK, including agreements between Gresham House Energy Storage Fund and EDF and Upside, as well as with KiWi Power for its 15MW Lockleaze project and Flexitricity for the Norkier Staunch project, and the 2MW battery installed by Pivot Power at the Arsenal Emirates Stadium, which is fully automated and optimised by Open Energi’s Dynamic Demand 2.0 platofrm.

As Robyn Lucas, head of data science at Open Energi, explained in a blog for sister site Current±, “getting the maximum price per hour of operation requires market insight, automated response, an understanding of the constraints of the battery and the site on which it sits, and an appreciation of the risks involved – with buy-in from all parties”.

Ørsted currently manages its own group assets, as well as third party assets, but this agreement represents an expansion of its services to include storage and other flexible generation technologies.

Ørsted completed its maiden large-scale UK battery, a 20MW system in Liverpool, in January 2019, through which its asset optimisation software has been developed and tested, which gave Ørsted “valuable insight and experience which we can now pass on to third party clients”, Worthington added.

Over the years, due to increased consumption, the availability of fossil fuels has decreased significantly. The crude oil reserves are getting declined at the rate of 4 billion tonnes a year, and at this rate, it is predicted that the oil deposits will last until 2052. Attributed to this, and the ever-surging need for energy, there is a rising requirement for alternate ways of generating energy. In addition, the increased usage of fossil fuels for power generation has resulted in a severely degraded environment. Hence, the demand for pollution free and environmentally sustainable energy resources is growing. Furthermore, due to all these factors, the need for energy storage systems is also increasing.

Energy storage systems allow the effective integration of renewable energy and provide benefits of local generation and a resilient, clean energy supply. As per a report by P&S Intelligence, in 2017, the installed capacity of global energy storage market was 6,275.4 megawatt and is predicted to attain 51,426.0 MW in 2023, advancing at a 42.5% CAGR during the forecast period (2018–2023). The different types of energy storage systems are electrochemical, chemical, mechanical, thermal, and others (which include biological and fossil fuel storage). The largest demand during 2013–2017 was created for mechanical energy storage systems, as these systems can be installed on a large-scale in the utility systems and can further be utilized in high demand scenario.

There are several applications of energy storage systems including back-up supply, arbitrage, ancillary services, and fuel savings. Some other applications include running mills and air conditioning. Out of these, the highest demand for energy storage was created for the ancillary services application and the situation is projected to remain the same in the coming years as well. The reason for this is that energy storage has the capability to make grid more reliable and efficient. The fastest growth in demand during the forecast period is expected to be witnessed by the arbitrage application.

Among all the regions, namely Asia-Pacific (APAC), North America, Europe, and Rest of the World, North America created the highest demand for energy storage during 2013–2017. In the region, the energy storage market in the U.S. was the largest during 2013–2017 and the situation is projected to remain the same during the forecast period as well. The reason for this is the low cost and favorable state policies which support the case for installing batteries in homes, power grid, and businesses. Out of all the regions, APAC is expected to witnessed the fastest growth in demand for energy storage.

The need for energy storage systems is further growing due to the increasing cost of energy. The requirement for energy is rising rapidly because of the surging population and swift urbanization, primarily in countries including India, China, and Brazil. Due to this, the power plants are running at full capacity, which, in turn, is resulting in the gradual rise in the power prices. Furthermore, the unavailability of fuel is leading in the volatility of prices. Ascribed to these factors, the adoption of energy conservation is increasing, thereby resulting in the growing utilization of energy storage systems.