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As a resource that can both absorb and discharge energy at a moment’s notice, batteries are very different from both dispatchable generators and intermittent wind and solar farms. That requires new technical and economic systems for managing and valuing them — and the grid operators that run wholesale electricity markets serving about two-thirds of the country are struggling to make those changes to keep up with the pace of growth.
That’s one of the key takeaways from last week’s Energy Storage Association Policy Forum, where representatives of the country’s regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and independent system operators (ISOs) joined storage industry groups and regulators to describe their work on energy storage integration.
The Energy Storage Policy Forum is an elite gathering of energy storage professionals and policymakers who come together to discuss the anticipated policy activities and issues each year for the purpose of educating attendees and supporting the policy and advocacy program of ESA. Click here to register for the program, February 3-4, 2021.
President-elect Joe Biden’s presumptive choice for energy secretary is expected to transform an obscure department agency that was on the Trump administration’s chopping block into a central part of the new administration’s climate strategy, renewable advocates in Congress and the energy industry say.
Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm is especially well suited to make the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, known as ARPA-E, essential to Biden’s renewable energy agenda because of her support for revitalizing the auto industry following the 2008 economic crisis, said Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of the Energy Storage Association. Speakes-Backman sees ARPA-E playing a more critical role in the advancement of battery technology under Biden so that renewable energy can be used any time of day, regardless when the sun shines or the wind blows. ARPA-E’s mission “helps our whole industry,” she said.
Nationwide, a record 1.2 gigawatts of storage have been installed so far this year, according to Wood MacKenzie, a natural resources research and consulting firm. That number is projected to jump dramatically over the next five years, rising to nearly 7.5 gigawatts in 2025. Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of the U.S. Energy Storage Association, says that battery storage additions doubled in 2020, and would likely have tripled had it not been for construction slowdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Google on Wednesday unveiled plans to install its first backup battery at a data center, with ambitions to use the project as a test case for grid service applications. The 3-megawatt, 2-hour-duration battery will be installed at a Google data center in Belgium, a location selected because its market has policies that allow batteries to provide frequency regulation to the grid. Google is already experimenting with load-shifting on a pilot scale. Google has matched its overall electricity consumption with 100 percent renewable energy purchases since 2017.
As multiple states and municipalities drive toward 100% renewable energy, the Pacific Northwest may be in the most unique position to answer the questions that generally arise despite geographic, economic and climate differences with the rest of the country. Such questions include: What is the right mix of wind, solar, storage, nuclear and hydropower to provide carbon-free energy at an affordable and reliable level? How much should natural gas be relied on as a ‘bridge fuel,’ if at all?
California’s energy agencies will soon release a final root cause analysis of the rolling blackouts that affected the state this past August, and the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) has focused its efforts on preparing for summer 2021, according to executives. The final analysis is expected to point to three contributing factors — the climate-change induced heat storm in the Western U.S., changing supply and demand patterns, as well as market practices that exacerbated the problem, CAISO’s new Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President Mark Rothleder said
U.S. battery developer Solid Power has begun pilot production of lithium metal all solid-state batteries at its Colorado facility. The company says it has also sent out prototype battery cells for independent evaluation, and expects to begin formal testing to qualify its batteries for integration into electric vehicles by early 2022.
An agreement has been signed for a 100MW / 400MWh battery storage project in Queens, New York, by utility company Con Edison and Hanwha Group-affiliated renewable energy developer 174 Power Global. The project will be one of the world’s larger battery storage projects to date and the US state’s largest so far by some distance – currently the only transmission-connected battery project in New York is the 20MW KCE NY 1 project completed by developer Key Capture Energy a while back, although many more multi-megawatt projects are thought to be on the way albeit outside of New York’s densely populated urban areas.
After ten secretive years, several hundred million dollars spent, and the efforts of hundreds of scientists and engineers, QuantumScape went public on a video call today with the performance results of its solid-state battery — and its potential impact on the electric vehicle industry. In a world of breakthrough battery performance claims — QuantumScape seems closest to actually building better batteries.
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