battery storage

Utilities are starting to invest in big batteries instead of building new power plants

Posted on August 14, 2019 by abrahamwien18

By Jeremiah Johnson and Joseph F. Decarolis
View the original article here.

This is what a 5-megawatt, lithium-ion energy storage system looks like. Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Due to their decreasing costs, lithium-ion batteries now dominate a range of applications including electric vehicles, computers and consumer electronics.

You might only think about energy storagewhen your laptop or cellphone are running out of juice, but utilities can plug bigger versions into the electric grid. And thanks to rapidly declining lithium-ion battery prices, using energy storage to stretch electricity generation capacity.

Based on our research on energy storage costs and performance in North Carolina, and our analysis of the potential role energy storage could play within the coming years, we believe that utilities should prepare for the advent of cheap grid-scale batteries and develop flexible, long-term plans that will save consumers money.

Peak demand is pricey

The amount of electricity consumers use varies according to the time of day and between weekdays and weekends, as well as seasonally and annually as everyone goes about their business.

Those variations can be huge.

For example, the times when consumers use the most electricity in many regions is nearly double the average amount of power they typically consume. Utilities often meet peak demand by building power plants that run on natural gas, due to their lower construction costs and ability to operate when they are needed.

All of the new utility-scale electricity capacity coming online in the U.S. in 2019 will be generated through natural gas, wind and solar power as coal, nuclear and some gas plants close. Credit: U.S. Energy Information Administration

However, it’s expensive and inefficient to build these power plants just to meet demand in those peak hours. It’s like purchasing a large van that you will only use for the three days a year when your brother and his three kids visit.

The grid requires power supplied right when it is needed, and usage varies considerably throughout the day. When grid-connected batteries help supply enough electricity to meet demand, utilities don’t have to build as many power plants and transmission lines.

Given how long this infrastructure lasts and how rapidly battery costs are dropping, utilities now face new long-term planning challenges.

Cheaper batteries

About half of the new generation capacity built in the U.S. annually since 2014 has come from solar, wind or other renewable sources. Natural gas plants make up the much of the rest but in the future, that industry may need to compete with energy storage for market share.

In practice, we can see how the pace of natural gas-fired power plant construction might slow down in response to this new alternative.

Grid-scale batteries are being installed coast-to-coast as this snapshot from 2017 indicates. Credit: U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Battery Storage Market Trends, 2018.

So far, utilities have only installed the equivalent of one or two traditional power plants in grid-scale lithium-ion battery projects, all since 2015. But across California, Texas, the Midwest and New England, these devices are benefiting the overall grid by improving operations and bridging gaps when consumers need more power than usual.

Based on our own experience tracking lithium-ion battery costs, we see the potential for these batteries to be deployed at a far larger scale and disrupt the energy business.

When we were given approximately one year to conduct a study on the benefits and costs of energy storage in North Carolina, keeping up with the pace of technological advances and increasing affordability was a struggle.

Projected battery costs changed so significantly from the beginning to the end of our project that we found ourselves rushing at the end to update our analysis.

Once utilities can easily take advantage of these huge batteries, they will not need as much new power-generation capacity to meet peak demand.

Credit: The Conversation

Utility planning

Even before batteries could be used for large-scale energy storage, it was hard for utilities to make long-term plans due to uncertainty about what to expect in the future.

For example, most energy experts did not anticipate the dramatic decline in natural gas prices due to the spread of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, starting about a decade ago – or the incentive that it would provide utilities to phase out coal-fired power plants.

In recent years, solar energy and wind power costs have dropped far faster than expected, also displacing coal – and in some cases natural gas – as a source of energy for electricity generation.

Something we learned during our storage study is illustrative.

We found that lithium ion batteries at 2019 prices were a bit too expensive in North Carolina to compete with natural gas peaker plants – the natural gas plants used occasionally when electricity demand spikes. However, when we modeled projected 2030 battery prices, energy storage proved to be the more cost-effective option.

Credit: The Conversation

Federal, state and even some local policies are another wild card. For example, Democratic lawmakers have outlined the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan that could rapidly address climate change and income inequality at the same time.

And no matter what happens in Congress, the increasingly frequent bouts of extreme weather hitting the U.S. are also expensive for utilities. Droughts reduce hydropower output and heatwaves make electricity usage spike.

The future

Several utilities are already investing in energy storage.

California utility Pacific Gas & Electric, for example, got permission from regulators to build a massive 567.5 megawatt energy-storage battery system near San Francisco, although the utility’s bankruptcy could complicate the project.

Hawaiian Electric Company is seeking approval for projects that would establish several hundred megawatts of energy storage across the islands. And Arizona Public Service and Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority are looking into storage options as well.

We believe these and other decisions will reverberate for decades to come.If utilities miscalculate and spend billions on power plants it turns out they won’t need instead of investing in energy storage, their customers could pay more than they should to keep the lights through the middle of this century.

The United States is headed for a battery breakthrough

Posted on August 14, 2019 by abrahamwien18

By Tim Sylvia
View the original article here.

A new report by the Energy Information Administration projects U.S. installed battery storage capacity will reach 2.5 GW by 2023. Florida and New York are set to pave the way as massive projects in each state will account for almost half the coming capacity.

Storage is ready to take off in a big way. Image: Tesla

Symbiosis is one of life’s most beautiful phenomena. Certain things just work perfectly together and the energy revolution is no different, as renewable energy resources and battery storage go together like peas in a pod.

However, the United States has an operating battery storage capacity of only 899 MW to date. And while that figure is expected to reach 1 GW this year that would still only represent 1/67th of the nation’s cumulative solar generation capacity, and an even smaller percentage of the overall renewables capacity.

That could all be about to change dramatically though, as the U.S. Energy Information Administration(EIA) has released a report predicting battery storage capacity will almost treble by 2023, to 2.5 GW.

Past, current and predicted U.S. battery storage capacity levels. Image: EIA

The projections were made based on proposed utility scale battery storage projects scheduled for initial commercial operation within five years. The EIA tracks data with its Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory survey, which updates the status of projects scheduled to come online within 12 months.

As drastic as a prediction of 2.5 GW appears, there is a precedent. Between late 2014 and March, installed battery storage capacity rose more than four times over, from 214 to 889 MW.

A look at the states that brought the U.S. to its current storage reality offers surprising results. Leading the way was California, unsurprisingly. However, of the six states known to pv magazine to have energy storage mandates, California is the only one in the top 10 for installed capacity. The others: Arizona, Nevada, New York, Massachusetts and Oregon; each have less than 50 MW of installed battery storage capacity.

The top 10 states in terms of current installed battery storage capacity. Image: EIA

Texas, Illinois and Hawaii are relatively unsurprising storage pioneers as all three states have strong solar industries and Hawaii especially has been pushing battery storage deployment. Right away, however, the names that stand out on the list are West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. None of those is known as a solar pioneer; they have just under 650 MW of generation capacity installed between them. Special recognition goes to West Virginia on that score, with its 8.5 MW.

So what’s with all the storage? Independent of renewables West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio – plus New Jersey, the seventh state on the list – are all members of the PJM Interconnection. PJM was the first large market for battery storage, and uses the technology for frequency regulation.

That list is likely to look different by 2023, however. Of the 1,623 MW expected to come online by 2024, 725 MW will come courtesy of two projects – both in states outside the current top 10.

Two mammoth projects

The first of those is Florida Power and Light’s (FPL) planned battery system for its Manatee Solar Energy Center in Parrish. The battery is set to clock in at 409 MW, which would make it the largest solar powered battery system in the world.

In that project’s shadow, but nevertheless considerable is the Helix Ravenswood facility, planned in Queens, New York. Almost more impressive than the project’s anticipated 316 MW of capacity is the idea of having a storage project of such magnitude in NYC.

FPL’s Manatee battery is anticipated to begin commercial operation in 2021, as is the first stage of Helix Ravenswood. That initial phase in New York will represent 129 MW of capacity, with the remaining 187 MW following via a 98 MW second phase and 89 MW final stage. The anticipated commercial operation dates of those expansions have not yet been announced.

We have seen the future and there are batteries, lots of them, demonstrating symbiosis extends beyond the natural world.

Warren Buffet’s MidAmerican Energy puts in Iowa’s latest big battery project

Posted on February 4, 2019 by abrahamwien18

Grand Ridge, an existing Invenergy project that combines wind power and energy storage, in Illinois. Image: Invenergy.

View the original article here.
The US state of Iowa got its first grid-scale solar-plus-storage system at the beginning of this year, and this has already been followed by the completion of another, larger battery project in the US state this week.

Energy-Storage.news reported last week on the completion of a solar PV system at Maharishi University of Management equipped not only with solar trackers but also with a 1.05MWh flow battery.

This week, project developer Invenergy said a four month “construction sprint” had been successfully undertaken and the company has begun commercial operations of a 1MW / 4MWh lithium iron phosphate battery energy storage system.

Located at a substation in Knoxville, Iowa, the project has been executed for utility MidAmerican Energy, one of billionaire investor Warren Buffet’s companies as a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy. MidAmerican serves just under 800,000 electricity customers.

In a November press release, MidAmerican’s VP of resource development said the utility-scale storage system would teach lessons about “how best to use an energy storage system, and how it can serve our customers in the future,” adding that the primary purpose of the system will be to help manage peak loads on the utility’s network.

“Energy storage has the potential to allow us to retain energy when customer demand is low and release it during peak usage times. That would give us new options to manage peak loads, enhance overall reliability and help keep electric costs low and affordable for our customers,” Mike Fehr of MidAmerican Energy said.

The utility highlighted four of the main benefits of energy storage that it will explore through the application of the lithium system: flattening and managing peaks in electricity demand through storing off-peak energy for later use, reducing the required run times and capacities of natural gas peaker plants with energy storage, enhancing the value and usefulness of renewable energy through smoothing the output of solar farms before it enters the grid and improving power quality and extending the life of transformers and other grid infrastructure.

“Energy storage is still in the development stages and the economic feasibility on a larger scale is being assessed as well; however, prices are trending downward,” Mike Fehr said.

“MidAmerican Energy wants first-hand experience with the technology so we’re positioned to quickly and efficiently add it to our system in ways that benefit our customers when the price is right.”

For Invenergy, which already owns and operates four other large-scale battery systems it developed, this has been its first project as an EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) partner.

“We are excited by the new opportunities for battery storage that we are seeing around the country. We are grateful for partners like MidAmerican Energy who are seeking innovative ways to deliver value to their customers and are proud to have provided them with this solution in such a short time,” Invenergy senior VP Kris Zadlo said.

Siemens Gamesa Pursues Hybrid Wind and Solar Projects With Energy Storage

Posted on August 7, 2018 by abrahamwien18

The company confirms hybrid systems are a growing focus area.

By Jason Deign
View the original article here.

Siemens Gamesa Pursues Hybrid Wind and Solar Projects With Energy Storage

Siemens Gamesa, the leading turbine manufacturer, is looking to go beyond wind — into hybrid systems with solar and storage.

The company’s chief technology officer, Antonio de la Torre Quiralte, told GTM that Siemens Gamesa remains committed to the wind market. However, it is increasingly interested in other technologies to reduce renewable energy intermittency.

“Following the merger about one year ago, we realized that our two former companies were quite interested in resolving the renewable problem, which is discontinuity,” he said.

“As part of our business strategy, there is a clear mandate from our CEO and our board that we will resolve, with a huge investment in new technologies, solutions for the market that will allow, quite soon, stable renewable procurement of energy.”

The development of systems that can provide baseload or near-baseload capacity could involve the hybridization of potentially complementary generation technologies such as wind and solar. But storage is a big part of the equation.

“It definitely is in our roadmap,” de la Torre said.

De la Torre said the manufacturer is focused on solutions rather than products, integrating energy storage with renewable plants at the project level.

He also said Siemens Gamesa is looking beyond today’s existing utility-scale battery storage capacities, which typically run to tens of megawatt hours, to gigawatt-hour levels of storage.

Batteries will remain the company’s technology of choice for standalone hybrid and off-grid systems, which demand storage capacities of between 500 kilowatt-hours and 50 megawatt-hours for onshore wind and PV plant balancing.

But Siemens Gamesa is also investigating a thermal storage system called the Future Energy Solution, which could boast much higher capacities. A demonstration plant currently under construction in Hamburg will be able to deliver 1.5 megawatts of power for 24 hours.

Siemens Gamesa hopes to use this kind of technology for round-the-clock renewable energy generation. “We have to integrate several renewable sources,” said de la Torre. “Currently we are investigating all relevant sorts of storage.”

Recently, for example, Siemens Gamesa started testing a 120-kilowatt, 400-kilowatt-hour redox flow battery at its La Plana test center near Zaragoza in Spain.

The test center had previously been used by Gamesa to put together a hybrid system combining traditional gensets with wind, solar and storage in 2016. Customer interest in hybrid systems with storage has grown in the last six to nine months, de la Torre said.

One example is the Bulgana Green Power Hub project owned by Neoen in Australia, where Siemens Gamesa will be acting as an engineering, procurement and construction contractor, and will be integrating a 194-megawatt wind farm with 34 megawatt-hours of Tesla storage.

Hong Zhang Durandal, a business analyst with MAKE Consulting, said Siemens Gamesa’s growing interest in hybrid systems reflects a wider trend within the wind industry. OEMs are not interested in having storage as a product, he said, but see value in adding other technologies to wind farms, for example to help avoid curtailment or smooth out imbalances.

It also makes sense for Siemens Gamesa to explore thermal or redox flow technologies for bulk, long-duration storage, he said. “For lithium-ion, getting to gigawatt-hours is just cost-ineffective,” he said. “It’s too large a system to justify the cost of the batteries.”

In a recent question-and-answer session published by Wood Mackenzie, Durandal said wind-plus-storage could offer new opportunities for energy production in the U.S.

“Wind farms paired with energy storage can shift energy from periods of low prices to take advantage of spikes and shift energy in bulk when it is most needed,” he said.

Pairing wind with energy storage also helps with ramp-rate control, can avoid curtailment and could open the door for project owners to compete for ancillary services revenues.

“We are seeing increased interest by wind turbine OEMs across the globe in exploring and developing utility-scale wind-plus-storage systems,” Durandal said. “Not only can the development of such systems strengthen the portfolio of the OEMs in key markets, [but] hybrid systems can also play a significant role in the deployment of more wind energy in the future.”

The World’s Biggest Solar Project Comes With a ‘Batteries Included’ Sticker

Posted on July 1, 2018 by abrahamwien18

By Brian Eckhouse and Mark Chediak
View the original article here.

The world’s biggest-ever solar project — a $200 billion venture in Saudi Arabia — comes with a “batteries included” sticker that signals a major shift for the industry.

SoftBank Group Corp. partnered with the oil-rich Saudis this week to plan massive networks of photovoltaic panels across the sun-drenched desert kingdom. The project is 100 times larger than any other proposed in the world, and features plans to store electricity for use when then sun isn’t shining with the biggest utility-scale battery ever made.

The daytime-only nature of solar power has limited its growth globally partly because the cost of batteries was so high. Utilities that get electricity from big solar farms still rely on natural gas-fired backup generators to keep the lights on around the clock. But surging battery supplies to feed electric-car demand have sent prices plunging, and solar developers from California to China are adding storage to projects like never before.

Cheaper Batteries

Costs are expected to drop in half by 2025 as factories ramp up battery production

“The future is pretty much hybrid facilities,’’ said Martin Hermann, the CEO of 8minutenergy Renewables LLC, a U.S. company that’s expecting to include batteries in the vast majority of the 7.5 gigawatts of solar projects it’s developing.

Affordable batteries have long been the Holy Grail for solar developers. Without them, some of the best U.S. solar markets, like California, have too much of electricity available at midday and not enough around dusk when demand tends to peak.

Wind Wins

While the solar industry has grown, it still accounts for less than 2 percent of U.S. electricity supply and has been outpaced by investments in other green technologies. Wind farms are set to overtake hydroelectric plants next year as the biggest source of renewable energy in the U.S., accounting for more than 6 percent of the nation’s electricity generating capacity, government data show.

Now, the economics of storage is shifting. The price of lithium-ion battery packs tumbled 24 percent last year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and the U.S. is allowing solar-dedicated storage to qualify for a federal tax credit. More utilities and local energy providers are mandating that new solar farms include batteries to store power.

Adding batteries to solar plants could revolutionize the industry. California has contemplated going all-renewable by 2045. It won’t be able to do that without storage, said Kevin Smith, chief executive officer of SolarReserve LLC, a solar project developer that uses molten-salt energy-storage technology.

More Control

“Storage just adds control,” said Logan Goldie-Scot, a San Francisco-based energy storage analyst at BNEF. “In a number of markets, you are seeing customers seeking a greater deal of control.”

By the end of 2018, it’s possible that U.S. utilities may be asking for batteries on every solar project proposed, said Ravi Manghani, an energy analyst at GTM Research. That would mean the country is about to embark on a major battery boom. Only about 1 gigawatt of storage had been installed in the U.S. through the third quarter, according to BNEF.

Several large developers already are proposing storage units as part of their projects, including NextEra Energy Inc.

Cypress Creek Renewables LLC, which builds clean-power plants, is contemplating batteries at every one of its early-stage solar projects, according to Chief Executive Officer Matthew McGovern. The company installed batteries at 12 solar farms last year.

The shift isn’t just in the U.S.

The Saudi-SoftBank project calls for an astonishing 200 gigawatts of generating capacity that would be built over the next decade or so, with the first electricity being produced by the middle of next year. Based on BNEF data, the project would dwarf the total solar panels that the entire photovoltaic industry supplied worldwide last year.

Evening Hours

A key feature of the project will be the construction of “the largest utility-scale battery” in two to three years that will supply “evening hour” power to consumers, Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder, told reporters in New York this week.

Tesla Inc., the Palo Alto, California-based carmaker that’s building batteries with Panasonic at a giant factory in Nevada, will supply the storage units for a solar project in the Australian state of Victoria. Houston-based Sunnova Energy Corp. is selling solar and battery systems in Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Maria devastated the island’s power grid in September and tens of thousands of people still don’t have electricity.

China-based Trina Solar Ltd., once the world’s largest maker of photovoltaic panels, is seeking to invest 3.5 billion yuan ($556 million) in integrated energy projects this year that could include power generation, distribution grids and storage, Vice President Liu Haipen said Wednesday in an interview in Beijing. Most of the investment will be in China, but the company is exploring opportunities in Germany, Spain, Australia and Japan, he said.

Cheaper batteries are even providing a boost in the residential market for solar systems.

“It’s a game-changer,” said Ed Fenster, executive chairman of San Francisco-based Sunrun Inc., the largest U.S. installer of residential solar systems. “The demand that we’re seeing is outstripping our expectations.”

— With assistance by Stephen Cunningham, Vivian Nereim, and Feifei Shen