POWERING THE SMART GRID
Issue 28: Spring 2020
Time to leave the lithium herd Utilities need to search for other options Li-ion: The fire within Death to subsidies! The threat thermal runaway poses to next generation utilities
How UK bankers are peeling back the frontiers of grid energy storage
The big squeeze
Scalable, economical, practical — the joys of CAES, LAES plants www.energystoragejournal.com
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EDITORIAL Debbie Mason: debbie@energystoragejournal.com
Don’t let lithium become the plastic of the battery industry In 1862 Alexander Parkes exhibited his Parkesine material at the Great Exhibition in London.
Lithium-ion batteries have undoubtedly changed our world, in many ways for the better.
His organic material, derived from cellulose, could be heated and moulded into an object that would retain its shape when cooled — and thus began the story of a material which can now be found in the most remote corners of the world.
We can now take our work everywhere with us, keep in touch with our family and friends, have a ready source of entertainment in hand and don’t get lost in unfamiliar places.
Plastic then appeared in many various forms, such as John Wesley Hyatt’s Celluloid in 1869, which became the first commercially successful form of plastic, used widely in the film industry. Arguably the most important inventor along the plastic path was Leo Baekeland, the Belgium-born American chemist, who in 1907 invented synthetic plastic that he called Bakelite, preferring that name to the slightly less snappy but correct polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride. It was an instant hit, and soon found its way into every household: as a surface protector, casing for electric wiring, toys, jewellery, kitchen appliances — its uses were countless. A century later and we’re swamped with the stuff. Plastic is everywhere, even in teabags. The science journal Nature said that in March 2018 up to 80,000 tonnes of ocean plastic were floating inside an area of 1.6 million square kilometres — and our landfill sites are overflowing with it. The trouble is, we don’t have a practical, affordable alternative: plastic became universal, we stopped looking for other options as it was so convenient and it’s now become indispensible. Scientists are trying to come up with alternatives — edible wrappers for fruit and vegetables, for example, and ‘Bags for Life’ at supermarkets — but not before our oceans and forests have been choked by cling film and suffocated by single-use shopping bags. We need another choice, just as we needed other choices when coal burning started to shroud our cities in smog, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) punctured holes in our ozone layer and lead, which when used in a compound in petrol was a miracle cure for the knocking in internal combustion engines, caused mass poisonings for more than 70 years. www.energystoragejournal.com
They are also the reason why electric vehicles, like them or not, are available across the world. But they might not be the best option for all applications, and they certainly have their downsides — fire risk, cost, duration, source of materials and recyclability. The California Energy Commission’s decision in December to exclude lithium-ion technologies from applying for grant funding for energy storage projects is a positive move that might discourage utilities from blindly following the herd towards lithium batteries for grid storage when there may just be better options available. And as you will read in our cover story, utilities do seem to be waking up to the fact that while lithium has given the world immeasurable benefits in many ways, they still don’t need to put all their eggs in one basket. It might be the newest, sexiest technology around at the moment, but it might not always be the best, and surely it’s better to consider other options before becoming completely reliant on just one. Going back to plastic, it’s not all gloom. It’s still a most incredibly useful material, and great strides have been made in recycling it (although there is stlll a way to go). But with that useless power of hindsight, had we known now just what problems plastic would cause, perhaps we wouldn’t have wrapped oursleves up in it so completely. However we do know of the potential risks and disadvantages of lithium battery technology — and while they’re not likely to disappear, unlike plastic they don’t have to be the only choice. Enjoy the issue. Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 1
Contents ESSENTIAL READING
Energy Storage Journal | Issue 28 | Spring 2020
Cover story — Lithium
News
Finance
26
3
18
TIME TO LEAVE THE LITHIUM HERD
PEOPLE, R&D, DEALS RENEWABLES+STORAGE
UK RENEWABLES AND THE GRID
Lithium may have become the status quo of the energy storage world,but sceptics suggest that a herd mentality has been behind its mass adoption, and that other technologies need a look-in.
The News pages are our quarterly round-up of the most important and up-to-date happenings in the energy storage industry: its people, its deals, its technology and its very latest projects.
Is a post-subsidy UK solar market about to unleash huge opportunities for battery storage? Equally importantly, argue industry players, what potential markets will now come from this?
ABOUT US
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
11
14
EDF buys Pivot Power to expand battery storage and EV charging network.
Hornsdale plans doubling capacity of the ‘Tesla Big Battery’ in South Australia.
35
38
Compressed and liquefied air energy storage: a new twist on an old technology.
ESJ Reviews: Intersolar India, ees India, Power2drive India. UK Battery & Energy Storage.
IN THIS ISSUE: 1 EDITORIAL: Don’t let lithium become the plastic of the battery industry | 3 PEOPLE: Latest people news from around the globe 8 NEWS: The inside track on the news that matters to the industry | 11 DEALS | 14 RENEWABLES & STORAGE | 16 R&D 18 UK RENEWABLES AND THE GRID: Is a post-subsidy UK solar market about to unleash huge opportunities for battery storage? 26 COVER STORY: LITHIUM: When the tide turns – it may turn away from lithium | 34 OPINION: IHS Markit on The inevitability of a market surge | 35 CAES/LAES: Compressed air energy storage: a new twist on an old technology | 38 EVENT REVIEWS: Intersolar India, ees India and Power2Drive India & UK Battery & Energy Storage | 42 FORTHCOMING EVENTS: A comprehensive guide to events to watch out for in the coming months
Energy Storage Journal — Business and market strategies for energy storage and smart grid technologies Publisher: Karen Hampton karen@energystoragejournal.com +44 7792 852 337 Editor-in-chief: Michael Halls, mike@energystoragejournal.com +44 7977 016 918
Let cool heads prevail
Editor: Debbie Mason | email: debbie@batteriesinternational.com | tel: +44 1 243 782 275 Advertising manager: Jade Beevor | email: jade@energystoragejournal.com | tel: +44 1 243 792 467 Reporter: Hillary Christie: hillary@batteriesinternational.com Finance: Juanita Anderson | email: juanita@btteriesinternational.com | tel: +44 7775 710 290 Subscriptions and admin manager: Claire Ronnie | email: admin@energystoragejournal.com | tel: +44 1 243 782 275 Design: Antony Parselle | email: aparselledesign@me.com Reception: tel: +44 1 243 782 275 The contents of this publication are protected by copyright. No unauthorized translation or reproduction is permitted. Every effort has been made to ensure that all the information in this publication is correct, the publisher will accept no responsibility for any errors, or opinion expressed, or omissions, for any loss or damage, cosequential or otherwise, suffered as a result of any material published. Any warranty to the correctness and actuality of this publication cannot be assumed. © 2020 HHA Limited. UK company no: 09123491
The lead-lithium storage debate steps up a notch The new titan of lead The CEO interview
Next gen integrators
on, head-to-head
the ideal middle man
soon to a2020 Ecoult’s UltraBattery, Anil Srivastava and •Coming 2 • Energy Storage Journal Spring smart grid near you, ready to take lithium Leclanché’s bid for market dominance
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PEOPLE NEWS
Austin Attewell, 1930-2019
Austin Attewell, one of the early pioneers of primary lithium and thermal lithium batteries, has passed away at the age of 89. Attewell was arguably one of the brightest battery scientists of his generation and well known throughout the industry from the 1970s onwards. Born in April 1930 he attended a local grammar school in Frimley and Camberley before taking a
degree in chemistry at London University and military service in the Royal Air Force. He joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment, part of the UK’s defence ministry, as a research scientist looking at military batteries in 1952. He then worked for 42 years for the UK Scientific Civil Service before retiring as a consultant and helping with the creation of a database for the UK military. Much of his research was in developing primary lithium batteries with a particular expertise in thermal batteries, where batteries were required to give high amounts of energy in a rapid burst at elevated temperatures. He was also a pioneer in zinc air research and battery testing and forming
regulations and specifications around them. “He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of batteries and an impressive specific recall of projects, successes and failures from over the years,” says Andrew Ritchie, a colleague of his for many years. Attewell contributed several papers to the Journal of Power Sources, ranging from thermal batteries to safety testing. He became editor in 1993 and for several years contributed a column to Batteries International, the sister magazine to this publication. In 2001 he was awarded the Frank M Booth Award in recognition of ‘his outstanding contributions to the advancement of power sources, both technically and in furthering the ef-
fectiveness of the Power Sources Symposium. Cooperation with government organizations and manufacturers in North America who were working on weapons’ batteries led to his love of the US, where he and his wife holidayed for several weeks a year. Attewell was a man of many interests. He was a keen photographer, involved in all aspects of the British countryside — its landscape, transport and buildings — and had a lifelong interest in modelmaking, which led him into a deep involvement with the Pendon Museum Trust, an ambitious project to re-create in miniature and with detailed accuracy a small part of southern England as it appeared in the inter-war years.
Bühler appoints new chief of HR
Irene Mark-Eisenring will take over as chief human resources officer from September 1, Bühler announced on February 4. Current officer Dipak Mane will pursue other management tasks within the organization, the firm said. Mark-Eisenring joined Bühler in 2016 as head of corporate personnel development. She has a 20-year track record of managing human resource projects and holding leading HR roles, primarily in the financial industry, since graduating
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with an MBA from the University of Applied Sciences in St Gallen, Switzerland. “I am assuming this function with great motivation,” said Mark-Eisenring. “I look forward to working with the global human resources team to develop the attractiveness of Bühler as an employer and to create tangible value for our customers and for the company on the basis of our highly skilled and dedicated workforce. Our people are key for the future success of Bühler.” “The skills and qualifications of our employees, their commitment and their passion are essential for Bühler as a technology company,” said Bühler CEO Stefan Scheiber. “We are extremely happy to have found Irene MarkEisenring as an experienced leader and human resources expert for this key function.”
Fully continuous electrode slurry production. The Bühler fully continuous mixing process for LIB electrode slurry production meets the requirements of large scale battery manufacturing and provides various benefits compared to conventional batch mixing.
– 60% lower investment costs – 60% lower operating costs – consistent product quality Got a question? Let’s talk about it. gdnorthamerica@buhlergroup.com
Innovations for a better world.
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PEOPLE NEWS
Australian battery testing expert Bob Gell passes away aged 73 Robert Gell, an internationally respected expert on battery testing, electric vehicle charging and an early EV pioneer, died on December 10 at a private hospital in Adelaide, Australia after a brief illness. He was just 73 years old. Gell’s career in energy storage started in 1989 at GNB, a lead acid battery manufacturer later acquired by Exide Technologies. During this time he worked for the then leading Australian roadside assistance battery installers, Marshall Batteries. He was then shifted to the research and development arm of GNB, developing batteries to gain a longer lifespan in extreme temperatures. In the process he became an expert on lead battery additives with a formidable understanding of the causes of how and why batteries fail. In his next position he became national manager for commercial sales and worked there until about 2003, when he went to manage motoring organization Club Assist Australia. Here he took care of its global training and battery roll-out programs for the US and Europe markets at the time. “After a very brief 10-week retirement trial in 2011, he needed to do something,” says his son Phil Gell, also co-founder of Gelco
Services, a battery testing and validation firm that the two set up. “Over the years in Gelco he pioneered the installation of the first 3 DC electric vehicle fast chargers in Australia in 2011, then grew Gelco to cover automotive battery services before moving into storage, mobile power solutions and e-bike batteries.” From his early contacts with electric vehicles in the late 2000s, Gell was one of the first knowledgeable enthusiasts of lithium ion batteries, although he still saw a future for advanced lead batteries and followed the development of EFB and AGM batteries with much interest.
In March 2018, Digatron Power Electronics, the international testing firm, and Gelco Services formalized an existing working relationship, giving Gelco an exclusive technical sales and service representation for Digatron in Australia and New Zealand. Kevin Campbell, CEO of Digatron Power Electronics, said: “Our condolences go out to the Gell family and the team at Gelco Services, with the sad passing of Bob. “Bob and Digatron had a long standing partnership through his company that both sold and serviced our equipment in Australia. Bob will be sadly missed as a partner and as a friend. He was a true gentleman and a scholar.” Similar tributes have been made by his colleagues, friends, family and customers. “He was a man of tradition and innovation. He lived a life of love, fun, devotion and caring and is respected and remembered by all who knew him,” said a family statement. “He will be sadly missed by many around the world who called on his many talents and wealth of knowledge,” said a colleague. “It was humbling to see how many lives he touched, the respect he received as a professional businessperson, and of course a true gentleman … Bob you will be missed.” His son, Phil, who heads up Gelco, says his father had taken a step back from the business in the past couple of years to focus on the good things in life. A funeral service was held on December 17. He is survived by his wife Christine and his three sons Sean, Philip and Timothy and grandchildren Nicholas and Caitlyn.
“He will be sadly missed by many around the world who called on his many talents and wealth of knowledge … It was humbling to see how many lives he touched, the respect he received as a professional businessperson, and of course a true gentleman. Bob you will be missed” 4 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020
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PEOPLE NEWS
Digatron makes two new appointments in China and US Battery testing firm Digatron Power Electronics has made two appointments in the past couple of months, with a new director of sales in Los Angeles, US and a general manager at its Qingdao, China facility. Marcus Peng as director
Marcus Peng
He Zhou
of sales will have primary responsibility for the US west coast with special emphasis on the automotive sector. He will also help CEO Kevin Campbell with the firm’s operations in Qingdao. Peng has been involved in battery research, module and pack development and testing for more than 20 years, and has built up relationships within the lithium battery industry. His focus for Digatron
will be on the consumer electronics market and burgeoning technology sectors, including EV start-up companies, contact pack assemblers and cell R&D operations. He Zhou has been made general manager of the Qingdao facility, having joined the company in August 2018 when he lived in Aachen, Germany. “The management believes that He Zhou’s 12 years of study and work experience
in Germany and his Chines background can perfectly co-ordinate the differences between eastern and western cultures to make the company operate more efficiently,” the company said. “At the same time, He Zhou’s solid technical background and understanding of the Digatron Headquarters will enable the company to more effectively assist Digatron to achieve more in the Chinese market.”
Galyen steps away from CATL and joins Tydrolyte advisory board Robert Galyen, former CTO of the Chinese lithium battery giant CATL, has joined the electrolyte start-up Tydrolyte’s advisory board, the company said on December 4. During his eight years at CATL (China Amperex Technology Ltd) Galyen
helped to expand the company to more than 25,000 staff and cement the company’s position as the world’s largest manufacturer of lithium batteries. Galyen, who is also chairman of the Battery Standards Steering Committee at the Society of Automotive
Nemaska Lithium announces changes to board of directors Canadian chemical company Nemaska Lithium appointed director of the corporation Jacques Mallette as chairman of the board on January 19, replacing Michel Baril, who will continue to sit on the board of directors. The appointment comes as Nemaska Lithium makes plans to operate the Whabouchi mine in
Jacques Mallette
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Quebec, which sits on one of the richest lithium spodumene deposits in the world, both in volume and grade. The firm’s Phase 1 lithium plant has been producing battery-grade lithium hydroxide samples since 2017, the company says. The lithium salts produced will primarily go to the lithium battery market. “We are convinced that Corporation’s Whabouchi project is of great importance for Quebec’s economic development and a key player in the worldwide increasing lithium ion battery industry,” he said.
Engineers and a former chairman of NAATBatt International, joins former ALABC technical program manager Boris Monahov and former EPA administrator Stephen Johnson on the Tydrolyte board. Among the companies he has worked for are Magna, Delphi and General Motors. “The global automotive battery industry is experiencing tremendous growth, and Tydrolyte has a unique opportunity to play a critical role in the global race to develop and commercialize new technologies that deliver less expensive and longer lasting batteries,” Galyen said. Tydrolyte unveiled its electrolyte, of the same name, at the European Lead Battery Conference in Vienna in 2018. CEO Paul Bundschuh said at the time that the firm already had several patents pending for its new acid chemistry, which he said could potentially replace the sulfuric acid in lead acid batteries without the need for any other equipment or process changes.
Robert Galyen
“Our chemistry has the same negative sulfate so the core reactions are the same as with sulfuric acid, but our positive ion structure is completely different than what’s in sulfuric acid,” he said. “Bob Galyden has unmatched expertise and brings a wealth of industry experience to the advisory board, including insights to the Chinese market, that will be instrumental as we move closer to commercializing our novel lead acid battery electrolyte technology.” Tydrolyte says it has signed testing agreements with several of the largest US and international lead battery manufacturers, which were evaluating Tydrolyte in their batteries. It also says independent test results from the firm Electric Applications Inc show that the electrolyte increases battery life, efficiency and charge acceptance.
Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 5
NEWS Sunlight batteries announces spending $6.5 million to build first US plant Industrial battery manufacturer Sunlight, a member of the Greek multinational Group Olympia, is to spend $6.5 million to set up its first North American lead and lithium facility, the North Carolina government announced on December 5. The facility, in Guildford County, North Carolina, will assemble and distribute lead and lithium batteries for traction, standby and defence applications, in what the company says is its first major step to development of the US market by the establishment of a subsidiary and a large assembly hub. The assembly hub will be larger than its existing one in Verona, Italy. “The establishment of Sunlight in the US market is a significant milestone to our growth plan,” said Sunlight Batteries’ CEO Robby Bourlas. “With the launch of Sunlight Batteries USA, we create our largest assembly hub and a strategic geographic presence in a market we have been exporting to for the last six years. “This proximity will allow us to offer our highest quality products along with the best possible delivery times to better serve the demanding needs of the US market. “Our total investment of $6.5 million over the next three years is a starting point to support our organic growth, but we are also going to be evaluating other strategic opportunities.”
Wärtsilä signs contract to supply 100MW/100MWh of storage in SE Asia
Finnish technology group Wärtsilä said it had signed a contract in January to supply a 100MW/100MWh energy storage project in south-east Asia. The project will boost regional grid stability and brings the number of exist-
ing contracts to 35, totalling 1,500MW in the region, the company said. Wärtsilä did not say where the system would be installed. Wärtsilä designs and manufactures containerized systems that integrate renewables, thermal assets and energy storage. It also uses the firm’s GEMS energy management software platform to support the grid almost instantly to smooth renewables. “The region is aiming to
leverage its abundant wind and solar resources and reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, especially as grid systems develop and economies grow,” the firm said. In December, Wärtsilä won a contract to supply a 33MW power plant to the Caribbean island of Barbados’s Light & Power Company utility. The plant will be built next to a 10MW solar plant and will operate on liquid fuels.
Daybreak wins approval for second massive pumped hydro storage plant Energy storage developer Daybreak Power said on January 17 its application for a $3.6 billion 2,200MW pumped hydro facility near Page, Arizona has been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The Navajo Energy Storage Station, near the retired Navajo Coal Plant, will use water from Lake Powell and a new reservoir on a plateau above the lake to create a gigantic battery. It will use solar and wind energy to pump water to the upper reservoir before releasing it through turbines to generate 10 hours of energy a day to power cities in
California, Arizona and Nevada during demand peaks. Existing transmission infrastructure that was used by the retired coal plant will be used in the project, which is expected to come online in around 2030. This is the second massive application approved for Daybreak. The first, the 1,540MW Next Generation Pumped Storage facility five miles from the Hoover Dam in Arizona, is a similar facility, using solar and wind power during the day to pump water from Lake Mead to an upper reservoir at the top of a nearby hill before releasing it through
hydroelectric turbines to generate energy. This will provide energy for cities in Southern California, Phoenix and Las Vegas. US-based Daybreak Power, headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, has nearly 50,000 MWh of pumped storage hydropower capacity in its pipeline, the company says. “It’s long past time to stop messing around and start building storage projects that actually work to deliver renewable energy on demand, around the clock,” said Daybreak CEO Jim Day.
Tesla prepares to switch on 25MW battery to support South Australian wind farm Electric car giant Tesla is about to switch on a 25MW Powerpack battery that will provide back-up storage for a 278.5MW wind farm in South Australia, the firm announced on January 22. The battery has a storage capacity of 52 MWh. Lake Bonney Wind Farm, which is owned and operated by Infigen Energy, generates electricity for 110,000 homes, which make up 14% of households in South Australia, Tesla said.
8 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020
It also said the $38 million project had been part funded with $5 million from the state government and another $5 million from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). “This will allow South Australia to incorporate more renewable energy into the system and move towards net 100% renewable energy in the 2030s,” said South Australia’s minister for energy and mining,
Dan van Holst Pellekaan. Tesla’s Powerpack lithium-ion batteries were installed at the Hornsdale Wind Farm in South Australia, which is about to be expanded by 50%, Tesla said. Neoen, the French renewable energy developer that owns and operates Hornsdale, has said it will expand the 100MW battery, which was installed in December 2017, this March.
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NEWS
Kyocera and 24M develop world’s first semi-solid residential lithium battery system called Enerezza Japanese global electronics and ceramics giant Kyocera on January 6 launched an energy storage system that it claims is the first to use a semi-solid lithium battery technology by US firm 24M. Having begun pilot production of the semi-solid batteries based on 24M’s design in June, a full residential energy storage system called Enerezza has now been built by the Japanese firm. It says its customers will benefit from the system’s long battery life and ‘unparalleled safety’, and that 24M’s semi-solid technology ‘is the emerging standard for lithium-ion battery manufacturing’. The battery technology is so-called because its electrodes are semi solid, need no binder nor solvent and mix electrolyte with active materials to form a clay-
like slurry, which can be thickly applied to the metal foil used in the electrode and can be easily separated at end-of-life for recycling. The increased thickness of the slurry — about five times that of existing batteries — in turn increases the energy density of the battery and reduces the amount of foil required, thus the material cost. The technology is also safer and more reliable than existing lithium batteries, the firms say. With existing batteries, the electrolyte and a separator are sandwiched between the electrodes in the battery cell. If metal powder enters the cell or there is a short circuit between electrodes, fire can result. Because the new battery uses foil and does not require any metal cutting, and the cell’s external ter-
Because the new battery uses foil and does not require any metal cutting, and the cell’s external terminal is welded after each being sealed, no metal can enter the cell and risk of fire does not arise. minal is welded after each being sealed, no metal can enter the cell and risk of fire does not arise. In December 2018, 24M announced that Kyocera and other investors had handed it $22 million in series ‘D’ funding to accel-
erate the deployment of its manufacturing process and to develop high-energy density lithium cells for the EV market. With the launch of Enerezza the firms’ plan to start full-scale mass production this autumn.
Sonnen and Centrica form network of 100 residential storage systems German battery firm Sonnen and energy provider Centrica have installed a network of 100 domestic batteries in southern England to form the most advanced virtual power plant in the UK, Centrica said on January 17. The decentralized home energy storage network, in participating homes in Cornwall, was approved by National Grid, the multinational electricity and gas utility company headquartered in London. The network allows the batteries to be aggregated in a cloud platform to provide dynamic firm frequency response — selling storage space when
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the grid is overloaded, or providing stored energy during periods of peak demand. “In the past, automated demand response was the domain of large industrial and commercial energy users,” said Centrica’s global optimization director, Pieter-Jan Mermans. “In the last 12 months we have shown that networks of devices such as home batteries and hot water tanks can also take part, putting the customer in greater control of their energy, making them more sustainable and helping lower their bills.” Founded in 2010, Sonnen is among the among
the growing number of companies making batteries for residential storage, such as Tesla, with its Powerwall, LG Chem, Solax and BYD. Almost all use lithium ion chemistry. Sonnen’s range of batteries are lithium iron phosphate. “The digital energy transformation towards a clean energy system is taking place all over the world and our technology is an important key to its success,” said Sonnen eServices managing director Jean-Baptiste Cornefert. “Sonnen is the first provider in the UK to prequalify with a virtual power plant of decen-
tralized home storage systems. Every megawatt provided across the network replaces one that would have been generated by conventional fossil fuel power stations.” Centrica says its FlexPond software platform has been combined with Sonnen’s batteries with advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence that can control exactly when to charge and discharge the batteries, or when to adjust electricity consuming devices. It operates 2.5GW of virtual power plants in Europe, North America and Asia, the company says.
Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 9
NEWS
V2G technology to account for 30% of grid storage by 2050, says report Research consultancy DNV Global’s annual report Energy Transition Outlook 2019 predicts vehicle-to-grid solutions will become so widespread in homes, garages and street parking that on average 10% of EV batteries will provide around 30% of available electricitycapacity by 2050. The report says that “dedicated power system batteries, including both Li-ion and redox flow batteries, will grow fast after 2030, providing 62% of storage capacity by 2050, which will total 27 TWh by then.”
It also reckons that the so-called “continued learning rate” — the cost of a technology decreases by a constant fraction with every doubling of capacity— for battery storage will remain at 19% until 2050. This learning curve effect occurs because market deployment brings greater experience, expertise and industrial efficiencies, as well as further R&D. This learning rate means that battery costs in 2050 will decline to $25/kWh, from $125/kWh today. This will result from — and is a decisive factor be-
hind — the massive uptake of EVs, the report says. Wind has a historical learning rate of 16% and PV 18%, and DNV suggests that these will con-
VC funding for battery storage rises by 104% in the first nine months of 2019 A November report by market analyst Mercom Capital Group revealed that venture capital funding for battery storage companies in the first nine months of 2019 was up 104%. This totalled $1.6 billion in 25
deals compared to $783 million in 38 deals in the same period of 2018. The increase was primarily due to Northvolt’s $1 billion funding round in Q2 2019 which was the largest deal of the period. This is to
enable setting up the first gigafactory for lithium-ion battery cells in Europe. The gigafactory — to be established in northern Sweden — will have an initial capacity of 16GW per year, later to be expanded
US National Grid wins two ESNA awards Power utility US National Grid was given two awards for innovation in energy storage by Energy Storage North America, the North American arm of expo organizer Messe Düsseldorf, on November 7. It won two out of the three awards on offer. The awards were given in the microgrid and behind-the-meter sections ‘for employing innovation, leadership in energy storage and a positive impact on the energy storage industry’. The microgrid award was presented for the National Grid’s 6MW/48MWh battery storage system in Nantucket, Massachusetts,
which was built in partnership with Tesla and is the largest battery storage system in New England. It was installed to provide grid reliability during peak demand periods on the island. Most of the island’s energy comes from undersea supply cables from the mainland, and battery storage should defer the need for expensive additional cables. The behind-the-meter award was handed to the National Grid for its Connected Solutions battery project, launched in 2018. The programme,‘Bring Your Own Battery’, gives incentives to residential and small business battery
10 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020
owners across the state and Rhode Island for installing batteries and selling the power back to the local grid. “The winners of this year’s ESNA Awards have each played an integral role in advancing the energy storage ecosystem through impactful programmes, projects, technologies or policies,” said Janice Lin, ESNA conference chair. “By opening new markets and solving real-world problems for customers and the grid, projects and industry leaders continue to propel our industry towards unprecedented innovation and growth.”
tinue through to 2050. DNV GL predicts a rapid transition: by mid-century the energy mix will be split almost equally between fossil and non-fossil sources.
to 32GW, and will target both mobile and stationary energy storage markets. Northvolt also announced plans to establish a second gigafactory in Germany in cooperation with the Volkswagen Group. Sila Nanotechnologies, a company researching battery storage technology, secured another second slot of the five with $170 million in funding led by Daimler. Sila manufactures a silicon-based anode to replace graphite in lithiumion batteries. and, with this new funding, plans to develop materials to improve battery storage capacity according to CEO and co-founder, Gene Berdichevsky. There were three other large VC funding deals: Energy Vault raising $110 million, Romeo Power with $89 million, and Form Energy amassing $40 million. Market analyst Avicenne predicts that growth in the battery industry will have to more than double between 2015 and 2025 to meet demand — with a key area the integration of renewable energy into grids.
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NEWS — DEALS
EDF buys Pivot Power to expand battery storage and EV charging network designed, the firm says. “Our ability to provide high voltage connections with guaranteed future capacity and price certainty will be of interest to organizations considering a significant investment in charging infrastructure.” Pivot Power is operating in more than 40 locations in the UK with plans to install batteries directly to the high-voltage transmission system with total capacity of 2GW. The first two storage projects, in Kent and Oxford should be commissioned this year. “Battery storage integra-
tion in the electricity transmission grid will provide flexible capacity which will enhance the reliability of the network and boost the integration of renewable electricity,” said EDF. “Providing the nationwide connections to power rapid charging stations supports the uptake of electric vehicles instead of the internal combustion engine.” EDF’s promotion of electric vehicles is another stream to its business, which is traditionally an integrated energy company, selling gas and electricity to homes and businesses in the UK and generating electricity.
BASF expands sodium-sulfur battery partnership with NGK
longer life compared to other battery technologies,” says the firm. “These features are beneficial for stationary applications — in contrast to lithium-ion batteries, for example, which are suited to deliver high power over shorter periods.”
French electric utility company EDF Energy has bought the UK battery storage and electric vehicle charging network firm Pivot Power, the firms announced on November 4. Pivot Power, a start-up firm, claims to be developing the world’s largest transmission-connected
NGK Insulators, the Japanese ceramics manufacturer, and BASF New Business announced on November 7 they had entered into a joint development agreement to develop sodiumsulfur batteries for stationary applications. The goals are to achieve an increase in power and higher number of cycles per time unit, to open up new market segments for NAS batteries. The JDA extends a sales partnership agreement for sodium sulfur batteries announced this June.
battery storage and EV charging network. EDF’s purchase will hugely increase the firm’s footprint in the sector. Rapid charging at public hubs and overnight charging at commercial fleet and bus depots will require levels of power for which the distribution grid was not
“Sodium-sulfur technology is ideally suited for long duration energy storage,” says Frank Prechtl, a business director at BASF. “With our envisioned technical advancements, we want to significantly broaden the application spectrum for these batteries.” Tatsumi Ichioka, general manager of the NAS battery division at NGK said: “As we move towards the next generation of sodiumsulfur batteries, the interplay between the chemical processes taking place at battery cell level and the
battery modules as a whole system becomes more and more crucial. “BASF’s chemical expertise and our know-how in the design and production of battery modules and systems complement each other perfectly here,” NGK’s NAS battery is the world’s first commercialized megawatt-class battery. It has the capacity to store large amounts of electricity for hours. “The NAS battery system provides an array of superior features, including larger capacity, higher energy density and
Japanese firms to build lithium battery plant in India Japanese technology firms Toshiba, Denso and Suzuki have signed a memorandum of understanding to set up a $690 million lithium-ion battery factory in Ahmedabad, India, by the end of 2020. The venture, which has been named Automotive Electronics Power Private
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Ltd (AEPPL). will first construct lithium battery packs and manufacture modules. By the end of the second phase the firm aims to produce 30 million lithium cells a year by 2025. Ownership is divided Suzuki 50%, Toshiba 40% and Denso 10%. The announcement follows news
in July that Tata Chemicals is to set up a 10GW lithium-ion battery plant in the Dholera Special Investment Region of Gujarat. The site will also carry out lithium battery recycling, as well as undertaking research and development of lithium-ion technology.
Umicore to supply 80,000 tonnes of lithium-ion cathode materials to Samsung Umicore, the global materials and recycling giant, on October 24 said it had signed a multi-year agreement with Samsung SDI for the supply of close to 80,000 tonnes of high-performance nickel manganese cobalt cathode materials. Beginning this year, the cathode materials will be supplied from Umicore plants in different regions with the majority of volumes initially produced in Korea. Most of the volume will supply automotive applications, but some will be channelled to energy storage systems, the company said.
Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 11
NEWS — DEALS
Rolls-Royce increases stake to 73.1% in energy storage firm Qinous Rolls-Royce Power Systems has increased its stake in Berlin-based energy firm Qinous to 73.1%, both firms announced on January 15. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars was bought by German car company BMW in 1998, but the Germany-based Power Systems subsidiary still belongs to RollsRoyce Holdings, which is headquartered in the UK. It bought a 19.9% stake in Qinous, then a start-up, in October 2018. Qinous makes battery storage systems and associated control systems and has a number of storage systems installed around the world. It designs and manufactures on- and offgrid systems that range in
size from 40kWh to multimegawatt hours. “Our new subsidiary is to play a pivotal role going forward,” said Rolls-Royce Power Systems Division CEO Andreas Schell. “This is where we are going to pool all the division’s microgrid activities — from simple storage solutions to complete, complex microgrid solutions of various sizes and configurations. “As a young, start-up company, Qinous brings expertise that is an ideal complement to Rolls-Royce’s industrial credentials.” “This even closer partnership between RollsRoyce and Qinous is a logical and consistent step towards opening up the rapidly growing microgrid
Andreas Schell (right), CEO of R-R Power Systems Division and Steffen Heinrich, co-MD of Qinous
market,” said Qinous cofounder and co-managing director Steffen Heinrich. “The functionality and reliability of the solutions have been proved in a large number of projects.” When Rolls-Royce made its first investment in Qinous in 2018, Schell said it was in answer to
Oxis signs with Sanyo to target Japan with lithium-sulfur technology UK firm Oxis Energy announced on November 20 that it had signed an agreement with Japanese trading company Sanyo to introduce Oxis’s lithium sulfur battery technology to Japan, concentrating on the aviation, marine, defence and heavy electric vehicle markets. Oxis will undertake the
transfer of technology and skills, and Sanyo will provide before and after sales support to customers. Oxis’s technology will be cross licensed so that Sanyo can use its intellectual property rights. “This is a major step forward for us,” said Huw Hampson-Jones, CEO with Oxis. “Japan is one of the
most sophisticated of markets when it comes to rechargeable lithium battery technology. In fact, it was a Japanese company that first commercialized lithium-ion batteries in 1991. “Oxis Li-S has superior energy performance and safety and will probably replace lithium-ion over the next five to 10 years.”
Santander raises $33 million for UK battery company Zenobe Multinational Spain-headquartered bank Santander has raised £25 million ($33 million) for UK battery company Zenobe, which already operates 73MW of grid-scale battery capacity. The non-recourse debt facility was agreed in December and will be spent on behind-the-meter services for commercial and industrial customers to improve power supply
resilience, reduce energy costs, pay for new battery storage projects and provide services to the fleet vehicle sector, a growing branch of its business, Zenobe says. The company has nine sites across the UK, including what it says is the largest Tesla installation in the country, in Leicester. As well as its work with utilities and infrastructure and commercial and in-
12 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020
dustrial battery operations, Zenobe in May began to roll out electric vehicle fleets, owning and operating batteries in depots, providing smart charging infrastructure and supplying the batteries on the vehicles themselves. The funding follows £35 million ($46 million) equity that was raised from electric power companies JERA and TEPCO earlier in 2019.
the company’s customers’ needs in terms of autonomous energy supply systems that are efficient, reliable and environmentally friendly. “For this reason, we are now adding turnkey microgrids to our current portfolio,” he said. “In addition to the diesel and gas gensets, together with our partners like Qinous we will now offer battery containers, include renewable power generation plants, and combine that with intelligent control. “This strengthens our position as a provider of innovative power solutions able to supply our customers with microgrid systems tailored to their specific requirements.” Hampson-Jones says Oxis is already shipping cells in excess of 400Wh/ kg, and the firm’s scientists are confident of achieving in excess of 500Wh/kg by 2020/21. “Aviation and HEVs are two key target markets to benefit from Oxis Li-S gains in energy density, safety and lightness of weight,” said HampsonJones. “This partnership will see the established customer base in Japan benefit from this breakthrough battery technology.” Masanobu Shintani, president and CEO of Sanyo Trading, said: “From our 40 years’ business experience in the automotive industry, we believe that lithium sulfur batteries will be one of the most promising solutions for electrification in this industry. “It also has the capability to penetrate into next generation mobility such as eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft.”
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NEWS — RENEWABLES + STORAGE
Statkraft unveils first utility-scale battery installation in Ireland Norwegian energy producer Statkraft on January 8 unveiled Ireland’s first utility-scale battery installation, which will back up 23MW of onshore windgenerated power with 11MW storage capacity. The batteries, by LG Chem, will provide reserves to the national electricity grid, EirGrid, in the event of a sudden drop in power supply, and should be fully operational early
this year, the firm said. “This represents a very exciting milestone for power storage here,” said Statkraft Ireland managing director Kevin O’Donovan. The installation has been delivered in partnership with energy storage technology firm Fluence and is sited at Kilathmoy, on the Limerick/ Kerry border. “Ireland is one of the selected new growth mar-
kets for onshore wind and solar power in Statkraft,” the Norwegian stateowned company said. “Statkraft’s current de-
Google announces plans for 350MW solar-plus-storage installation Multi-billion dollar company Google has agreed to work with public Nevada utility NV Energy to install 350MW of solar PV and 250MW to 280MW of battery storage. This, the firms say, make it the world’s biggest battery-backed solar deal for a corporate customer, market analyst S&P Global Platts reported on January 7. The installation will power a new $600 million data centre near Las Vegas, and will be installed in ‘one or
more hybrid projects’. “Underlying project development agreements remain under negotiation, with solar-plus-storage resources expected to begin operation in the second half of 2023,” S&P said. Operations are expected to begin in the second half of 2023. In 2012 Google said it was committed to matching its entire electricity consumption with renewable energy, which it achieved in 2017, making it the largest
corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world. The tech giant, a subsidiary of the Alphabet conglomerate, says it is aiming for ‘24/7 renewable energy’, although according to S&P Global the battery-backed solar resources will still not eliminate Google’s reliance on fossil fuels: “the contract price also covers NV Energy’s cost of transporting natural gas for generating facilities supplying power to Google’s data centre,” it says. “NV Energy proposes to
velopment pipeline is 1.25GW of onshore wind, 500MW of offshore wind and 350MW of solar energy in Ireland alone.” supply Google with wholesale market energy during an interim period before the battery-backed solar resources come online.” NV Energy also has a contract with 8minute Solar Energy to operate a 475MW/540MWh solar project at the Southern Bighorn Solar & Storage Center, also in Nevada. Announced in June 2019, it also touted as one of the largest solar-plus-storage projects in the world. It was approved in December by the Public Utilities Commission, and is planned to be operational by the end of 2023.
UK’s Harmony Energy to build two 49.5MW battery installations UK energy storage firm Harmony Energy has been granted planning permission for a second 49.5MW battery storage system alongside an identical one to be built as a separate project on the same site at Creyke Beck substation, near Hull. The batteries will be connected to the substation and store power generated by the 2.4GW Dogger Bank wind farm off the east coast of England. The batteries will provide grid-balancing services and will begin operation in 1824 months’ time. Harmony Energy has a large pipeline of projects
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of utility scale, with its first 15MWh battery installation in Poole, Dorset, to begin imminently, with the turnon expected at the beginning of March. “Two thirds of the power from Dogger Bank will come into Creyke Bank,” said Alex Thorton, technical director at Harmony Energy. I’ve been working in the sector for three and a half years and UP to now batteries have always been something that’s going to happen in the future. “We now see large batteries like these playing an increasingly important role in decarbonizing and bal-
ancing the grid, as more and more intermittent renewables such as wind and solar assets come online while simultaneously traditional coal-fired power plants are retired. “Lithium is the best technology for these, it’s proven technology and each individual cell can be monitored and isolated if there is a problem. “But we are technology agnostic, and advise customers on the best technology according to their need. Flow batteries, for instance, are going to be a very big technology in the future — the capital outlay may be
higher than lithium but they have such long duration.” In September, Harmony Energy appointed Vijay Shinde, who has 20 years’ experience in the energy storage sector, as chief technical officer. This is the company’s drive to grow its battery storage capabilities for wind and solar storage projects, the firm said. “Harmony has more than 500MW of battery energy storage assets constructionready with another 200MW in planning, representing a significant pipeline of development at a critical time for the UK’s energy supply,” Shinde said.
Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 13
NEWS — RENEWABLES + STORAGE Salt River project to build largest solar+storage installation in Arizona Water and energy utility Salt River Project will build the largest solarplus-storage installation in the US state of Arizona, SRP announced on November 14. The installation’s two plants will generate enough energy combined to power 100,000 homes, SRP said, and should be operating by June 2023. The first plant, the Sonoran Energy Center, will consist of a 250MW solar array charging a 1GWh energy storage system in Little Rainbow Valley. The second, the Storey Energy Center, will be an 88MW solar and energy storage system just south of Coolidge. SRP says the project will make it one of the largest investors in energy storage in the country. The November closure of the coal Navajo Generating Station in the state has raised questions about the extent to which SRP, which owned almost half of the station, will be able to meet energy demand with renewables. But SRP insisted the utility “was well on its way to achieving these goals while continuing to aggressively pursue renewable generation. “These integrated solar and storage plants will allow SRP to meet its summer peak demand, reduce carbon emissions while optimizing energy output using state-of-theart battery technology,” said SRP general manager and CEO Mike Hummel. NextEra Energy Resources will own and operate the two plants.
Hornsdale plans to double capacity of the ‘Tesla Big Battery’ in South Australia The Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia is to be doubled in capacity, providing the first Australian large-scale demonstration of battery storage, owner Neoen announced on November 19. French renewable energy producer Neoen, the South Australian government, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation have agreed to expand the ‘Tesla Big Battery’ capacity by 50MW/64.5MWh to boost reliability and cost savings to customers — which the firms say amounted to A$50 million ($34 million) in its first year of operation. “The site will be the first grid-scale battery in Australia to provide inertia benefits to the National Electricity Market facilitating the transition towards a high-penetration renewable grid,” Neoen said. “The delivery of additional Tesla Power-
The Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia is to be doubled in capacity.
packs strengthens Neoen’s Hornsdale Power Reserve’s position as the largest battery in the world. “This will ensure South Australia can continue to harvest its world-class wind and solar resources and achieve its target of being net 100% renewable by 2030. “It will also see the state transition to becoming a net exporter of cheap and
clean energy to the NEM (National Electricity Market) and further drive down electricity prices for all consumers.” The Hornsdale Power Reserve will be upgraded with Tesla’s Virtual Machine Mode, which allows power inverters to emulate the existing inertia services being supplied by an ageing fleet of fossil fuel power plants.
Nevada agrees solar+storage projects for 590MWh as part of $1bn expenditure Three projects totalling 590MWh of energy storage capacity have been approved for 1,190MW of solar energy in the US state of Nevada, utility NV Energy announced in December. This could power 230,000 homes, it says. The Gemini, Southern Bighorn and Arrow Canyon projects will have lithium ion battery systems installed to back up electricity generated by solar panels. Gemini, being developed by Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners and Arevia Power, is being touted as the largest project of its kind in
14 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020
the country, possibly in the world. Sited on 7,100 acres of land, it will generate 690MW of electricity and be installed with battery storage capacity of 380MWh. It is expected to exceed $1 billion in capital expenditure, according to a press statement. “Gemini plans to showcase at scale one of the most promising technological advances in renewable power,” said Quinbrook co-founder and managing partner David Scaysbrook. “The project will demonstrate the ability to couple
solar PV technology with battery storage to capture Nevada’s renewable solar resource to deliver low-cost power to NV Energy’s customers. “Nevada is an ideal location for a project of this magnitude. The state is naturally endowed with the sun’s energy all year round.” Southern Bighorn, containing a 300MW solar array with 135MWh battery storage, will be developed by 8minute Solar Energy. Arrow Canyon, with 200MW of PV and 75MW storage, will be developed by EDF Renewables.
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NEWS — RENEWABLES + STORAGE
Iberdrola rolls out first storage system and plans for distribution networks in Spain Spanish utility firm Iberdrola has launched the first energy storage system with lithium ion batteries for distribution networks in the country, the utility said on November 25. The 3MWh storage system, by Iberdrola’s distribution arm i-DE, will store solar power to provide up to five hours of backup in the event of outages in the municipal district of Caravaca de la Cruz, in Murcia. The smart system is able to select which particular network needs back-up and then operate in isolation from the grid. Several large PV plants in Caravaca de la Cruz upload electricity to the grid during hours of sunlight. “The battery is able to adjust the voltage to the appropriate values and be ready to intervene as
a second source of power supply in the event of a power failure,” the utility said. “To achieve this, it has a smart storage system that is able to assess the situation and decide which part of the network will remain in operation from the battery, taking into account actual consumption at that time, the generation capacity of photovoltaic plants nearby and the state of charge of the battery, among other aspects.” Iberdrola believes storage systems are key to addressing the challenges of energy transition and will become an essential part of the whole power distribution network. “This is because they allow the quality of the electricity supply to be improved, ensuring the stability and reliability of
8Minute Solar Energy to provide 1200WHh solar+storage plant in US Private asset management firm Capital Dynamics and solar firm 8minute Solar Energy announced on January 22 a solar-plus-storage project that could be the second largest in the US. The Eland Solar and Storage Center, 70 miles north of Los Angeles, will have a 300MW/1200MWh energy storage facility and should be operational in 2023. It will serve the power needs of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Eland is a breakthrough project, setting
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records for low-cost solar, and incorporates a large battery energy storage centre that demonstrates solar’s ability to power California’s vibrant and growing economy 24/7,” said Tom Buttenbach, president and CEO of 8minute. “Benoit Allehaut, managing director of Capital Dynamics’ Clean Energy Infrastructure team said: “This is our fourth solar project delivering power to LADWP. Eland will also be the third hybrid solar plus storage plant in our portfolio.”
the network and integrating and harnessing the energy generated by renewable sources,” the company said.
Iberdrola operates 270,000km of power lines in Spain, serving a population of 17 million.
Let’s talk flow batteries!
Researchers, developers, manufacturers and users of new products meet at trade shows to share ideas, report progress and comment on trends and opportunities. Flow batteries have come a long way and are not a technical novelty, as shown by the number of established firms who have built factories, are selling products and installing flow batteries at all scales and sizes. The International Flow Battery Forum will be held in Düsseldorf from June 30 and is the place to talk flow batteries. Our discussions will raise the profile of flow batteries as a crucial technology at the intersection of the smart grid and renewable energy. We will be talking about the benefits of environmentally safe, low cost, reliable and long lifetime bulk energy storage. We’ll hear about the applications where flow batteries can make cost savings
and how recent advances in materials, manufacturing and performance are increasing the value of using flow batteries. Presentations will cover large-scale stationary electrical energy storage and other attractive applications such as transport and microgrids. The market for secondary batteries is immense — no single battery type is suitable for all applications. Finding the fit between technology and use is important, which is difficult to do in isolation, so we are expecting many users and potential users of battery systems, financiers and project developers to come to meet manufacturers, suppliers and researchers. As the use of flow batteries grows this is the opportunity to gain the knowledge to be ahead of the crowd. I look forward to meeting you at IFBF in Düsseldorf. Anthony Price www.flowbatteryforum.com
Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 15
NEWS — RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Battery Industrialization Centre for UK scheduled to open in spring British engineering firm NG Bailey has been hired to help set up the UK Battery Industrialization Centre, which should be completed by this spring, the firm announced on November 28. NG Bailey will be principal contractor for the £126 million ($163 million) facility, which will develop the latest battery technology in a government-backed project in the Midlands city of Coventry. “When complete in early 2020 it will play a crucial role in enabling the UK to prepare its home-grown battery technologies for
global competitiveness and will provide a stepping stone towards the creation of a UK gigafactory,” says the company. The UKBIC is part of the government’s Faraday Battery Challenge — a £246 million commitment over the next four years to battery development. Director of business development Isobel Sheldon confirmed that the batteries would be made for a range of industries, ‘from automotive EV to aerospace among others’. NG Bailey will deliver all mechanical and electrical
services for the development, with most equipment being manufactured offsite. “We are creating a bespoke 20m long, 5m high bridge structure that will house multiple services,” said Duncan Smith, operations director for the Midlands.
Jeff Pratt, managing director of UKBIC, said: “Phase one of the building shell construction has been completed and NG Bailey is due to start work on the second phase — the build project is starting to gather momentum.”
Industry first for new rechargeable lithium-carbon dioxide battery
A report published in the journal Advanced Materials says the scientists have overcome the traditional challenge with LiCO2 batteries, which was this inability to attain reversible formation and the decomposition of the Li2CO3 carbon discharge products. By using a combination of MoS2 nanoflakes as a cathode catalyst with an ionic liquid/dimethyl sulfoxide electrolyte, the scientists have come up with a fully reversible Li-CO2 battery, the report says. “This combination of materials produces a multicomponent composite Li2CO3/C product,” the report says. “The battery shows a superior long cycle life of 500 for a fixed mAh g-1 capacity per cycle, far exceeding the best cycling stability reported in Li-CO2 batteries. “The long cycle life demonstrates that chemical transformations, making and breaking covalent C–O bonds can be used in energy storage systems.” Theoretical calculations were performed by a group at the Argonne National Laboratory to deduce a mechanism for the reversible operation of the battery.”
Researchers at the University of Chicago have successfully tested the first rechargeable lithium-carbon dioxide battery, which can run up to 500 consecutive cycles. Researchers have long known that lithium-carbon
dioxide batteries are a good option for energy-storage systems because they have an energy density more than seven times higher than regular lithium-ion batteries. In lithium-carbon dioxide battery chemistries, the
discharge produces lithium carbonate and carbon. While the lithium carbonate recycles during the charge phase, the carbon instead — until now — accumulates on the catalyst, which ultimately leads to the battery’s failure.
Argonne hints at possible lead battery storage breakthrough Leading US battery CEOs visited the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in early December to coincide with early stage research findings suggesting big steps were being made in lead battery technology. “We’re already seeing results that will help us to develop next-generation batteries to meet the huge growth in demand for reliable and secure energy storage,” said David Shaffer, president of EnerSys. The Argonne lab houses the Advanced Photon Source, a DoE Office of Science User Facility.
The APS provides high-energy, storage ringgenerated X-ray beams that allow researchers to identify complex chemical reactions inside the battery in real time. The researchers believe internal knowledge of the exact mechanisms that cause battery degradation can be identified and radical improvements made to lead battery cycle life and dynamic charge acceptance. The APS research involves the same equipment used almost a decade ago in investigating lithium ion batteries. Enthusiasts of the three-
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year research project believe improvements could more than level the playing field between lithium and lead batteries. Shaffer said the work at Argonne underscores the importance of government collaboration with American industry to develop next-generation batteries, manufactured domestically for use in vehicle and grid applications. The project is funded by a joint industry cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) consisting of more than 90% of the US lead battery industry.
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UK RENEWABLES AND THE GRID
Finance solutions to kick-start the power stations of the future Is a post-subsidy UK solar market about to unleash huge opportunities for battery storage? Equally importantly, argue industry players, what potential markets will now come from this? Sara Verbruggen reports. Life after subsidies. At one point it was the promised land for the renewables industry. A decade ago, the idea that solar panels could pay for themselves without government incentives was just a dream. But that dream has happened. The feed-in tariff, paid by the government to individual households, ended in March last year. The replacement, the Smart Export Guarantee, introduced this January now requires all the large energy suppliers to pay for the electricity that is generated. In effect it requires all the major utilities to figure out a way to price
18 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020
— and, more importantly deal with — incorporating renewable energy into the grid. The answer, known for at least a decade but until now reckoned uneconomical, is energy storage — and nowadays that means battery storage in sizes hardly imaginable even a few years ago. According to trade body RenewableUK, the UK’s battery storage pipeline reached 10.6GW at the end of 2019. That’s almost double the 2018 figure. With renewables entering the mix in ever increasing size, variable wind and solar generation continuing
to be built and baseload generation falling, huge amounts of energy storage will be needed. In its future modelling, the National Grid Electricity System Operator predicts energy storage capacity could reach 40GW-50GW by 2050, to support the UK achieving its carbon net zero target. There’s also the awareness that battery storage is needed in other more immediate ways. The huge power outage and related chaos in August 2019, causing huge swathes of southern England to go without electricity due to the the loss of 1691MW of capacity
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UK RENEWABLES AND THE GRID “Banks couldn’t lend money quick enough once they ‘got’ solar, and that will happen with storage at some point …”
We’ve seen the capacity market become a fight to the bottom, propping up fossil fuel generation. Frequency response is tricky too. All you are doing is creating headroom for the grid.” — Toddington Harper, Gridserve from the grid from a gas power station and an offshore wind farm, has provoked a rethink of the need for battery storage. The National Grid ESO plans to procure more capacity from fast responding assets such as batteries to mitigate shortfalls in supply and stabilize the grid’s frequency. Batteries can respond to outages in sub-seconds as against other forms of generation, which take anywhere from several seconds to a few minutes.
Moving away from subsidies
A rethink of the way that renewable power can feed into the grid is on the cards. One such pioneer, Gridserve, wants to build renewable power stations that integrate as seamlessly into the grid as conventional power generation.
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“In the subsidy era, all solar developers talked about was internal rates of return and spreadsheets. There was hardly any mention of energy or power,” says Toddington Harper, CEO of Gridserve. Harper, whose late father Brian Harper — a solar and storage pioneer who set up SEC Industrial Battery — says the hybrid solar projects Gridserve is building are akin to critical infrastructure assets. Using photovoltaic panels made from bifacial cells — where cells either side of the panel generate electricity — to achieve highest output, Gridserve’s projects also deploy trackers, spreading and evening out the productivity of solar generation over more hours in the day. The aim is to create a kind of super-optimized solar plant able to increase generation by at least 20%.
“The battery is the cherry on the cake,” says Harper. Gridserve has just completed its first hybrid solar-storage plant in York, based on an alternate current coupled design, although DC coupled solutions are in the works at the company. The facility comprises a 34.7MW solar farm, the largest to be completed since 2016, and a 27MW/30MWh lithium ion battery storage system. “The solar-storage facility is designed so that from the grid’s perspective it is one power plant. The solar can send power to the grid, or to the battery if there is not enough demand. At night the battery can recharge with power from the grid when prices are lower. The plant can also provide reactive power,” Harper says. It is, the company claims, the first true hybrid solar-plus-storage power
Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 19
UK RENEWABLES AND THE GRID “We see one of the risks with batteries is that you are more vulnerable to someone next door doing the same thing as they are comparatively straightforward to get permission for and develop versus solar.” plant to be built in the UK. Such projects are the exception, not the rule, even in markets like the US and Australia, where more of them are being built. Gridserve’s latest turnkey project was for Warrington Borough Council, although it will operate the facility on behalf of the council. Revenues come through selling electricity on the open market, supplemented further through the provision of grid services.
The business case Gridserve has come up with doesn’t rely on complex revenue stacking, where the asset is bidding into multiple markets, according to Harper. “When frequency response and the capacity market is available, we’ll take it, but we’re not building a business case around these. We’ve seen the capacity market become a fight to the bottom, propping up fossil fuel generation. Frequency response is tricky
too. All you are doing is creating headroom for the grid.” In the past 12 months, Gridserve has built and connected 60MW of solar and storage capacity. “Our pipeline for this year is significantly greater,” Harper says.
From solar, to storage
Anesco is one of a handful of UK developers and operators that has evolved from its roots in solar to operate one of the biggest battery portfolios in the UK. In the UK the company to date has installed 147MW of battery storage, owning 86MW of this, in addition to owning 10MW of solar. Anesco also provides third party asset management and operations and maintenance services for batteries it has built and sold on. The company’s 16MW Clayhill
ROUTES TO MARKET Gore Street Energy Storage Fund is working with a number of aggregators, such as Statkraft and EDF, to find opportunities to optimize batteries. Gore Street Capital chief executive Alex O’Cinneide says: “A while back there was interest in co-locating assets, such as solar and batteries or batteries and gas peaking plants. What you are also seeing now is aggregators using virtual power plant software to provide the solutions to the grid’s issues, while also providing routes to market for battery asset owners.” He says the value chain has grown but has also become more complex. “The first battery we acquired was 6MW and when we underwrote that investment it had a 3.5 year contract for firm frequency response, a 15year capacity market contract and a multi-year triads contract. “Scroll forward from 2016 to 2020 and fast frequency response revenues have declined from £22/ MWh to £9/MWh and contract durations are now month-to-month, triad avoidance [effectively peak demand charges] is phasing out and capacity market revenues are diminishing. “Frequency services are still a good source of revenue, but when you put loads of storage into the market, the price goes down. In the balancing mechanism revenue opportunities are fewer but the pricing is maintained.”
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According to O’Cinneide, opportunities for arbitrage and providing blackstart capability are also being explored by Gore Street as newer opportunities. “What’s interesting from our perspective is to see whether working with the providers of routes to market, which have a larger asset base at their disposal, translates into more revenue opportunities. Are they securing more of the contracts in these markets?”
“The UK has been the most important market in Europe for energy storage. It’s evolving fast.” — Alex O’Cinneide, Gore Street Capital
Gore Street is taking a position in both the energy storage market in the UK and the energy storage market that’s just getting going in the grid of Northern Ireland and Ireland, facilitated by the ‘Delivering a Secure Sustainable Electricity System’ programme known as DS3. (Ireland aims to generate 40% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.) “The UK has been the most important market in Europe for energy storage. It’s really evolving fast. The National Grid has managed to lower prices for frequency contracts,” says O’Cinneide. “It’s a more liquid market than a few years ago. Contracts are shorter but there are more of them and the availability of different markets and revenue streams is characterized by new ones emerging.” “The DS3 opportunity, while smaller, is important to us. Contracts have a fixed government-backed tariff for six years and their value is four times the value of those in the UK. Overall our portfolio of energy storage systems span revenues coming from long-term, medium and shorter term contracts. In Great Britain, returns are about 10%, which is good for an infrastructure asset in an OECD country.” Of its 189MW battery portfolio, Gore Street owns two 50MW projects in Northern Ireland and two 30MW projects in the Republic of Ireland, which will all derive revenues from DS3.
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UK RENEWABLES AND THE GRID plant, heralded as the UK’s first subsidy-free solar farm, consists of 10MW of solar and five 1.2MW battery systems on the same site. According to Anesco’s executive chairman Steve Shine, the company is seeing more interest for these co-located projects than it is for standalone storage. While these assets are not integrated in a way that constitutes a hybrid plant, co-locating solar and storage can reduce overall development costs. According to Shine, “Solar and storage provides a good natural hedge for investors, because you can hedge between the low productivity of the solar plant and vice versa.” In January 2020 Anesco sold a 12MW solar project in the Chilterns called the Bumpers to Gresham House, which invests in renewables, batteries and other sustainable assets, through its funds. The Bumpers solar farm, due online in March, is ready to take a battery of up to 4MW at a later date, as it is near a substation. The added battery could boost the site’s revenues by capturing energy during low demand periods and selling it when demand and wholesale prices are higher. Steve Shine says Anesco’s revenues have continued to climb this past year, but creating profits in energy storage is still hard work. Last year the company signed a deal with EDF Energy, in partnership with technology provider Upside Energy, to optimize the 16MW Clayhill solar and battery assets, with EDF Energy offering Anesco a guaranteed floor price for revenues from the batteries. “Some investors only see the engineering, procurement and construction and the capital expenditure costs and have yet to grasp the real opportunities around the running cost of the asset versus capex — even though we are very competitive on EPC,” says Shine. Shine says Anesco is on track to start building a larger solar-storage project some time in 2020. “Our focus has turned to getting projects in our pipeline shovel-ready and we’re looking to sell them. With investors it is a big hand-holding exercise. In the early years of solar it took a while for people to understand it. Solar is quite easy now. People understand the revenue opportunities. “With batteries it is more complicated in terms of what you do with it, the impact on battery degradation depending on how they are charged and discharged, as well as market restrictions and the like.”
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“Solar and storage provides a good natural hedge for investors, because you can hedge between the low productivity of the solar plant and vice versa.” — Steve Shine, Anesco
Last year Anesco signed a deal with EDF Energy, in partnership with technology provider Upside Energy, to optimize the 16MW Clayhill solar and battery assets, with EDF Energy offering Anesco a guaranteed floor price for revenues from the batteries.
A LIVELY PIPELINE Statistics by the UK Renewable Energy Planning Database show that the total capacity of solar, onshore wind and offshore wind as well as energy storage projects across England, Scotland and Wales, which are yet to be built, stands at just under 25GW. Delving further into this pipeline, renewables analysis firm Cornwall Insight found that just over 15GW of this capacity are classed as ‘awaiting construction’. Subsidy phase-out and political uncertainty are factors that are dampening investors’ confidence to press on with building projects,
according to Cornwall, which also foresees 2020 as the year when alternative subsidy-free business models and routes to market will start to emerge. As Anesco’s executive chairman Steve Shine points out, co-located solar-storage projects are seeing more demand than before. The Bumpers project sold to Gresham House is one of several examples where solar sites are being developed with the potential to add storage. European developer Voltalia is developing a 40MW solar farm in Dorset, which includes the potential for adding batteries.
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UK RENEWABLES AND THE GRID “With batteries it is more complicated in terms of what you do with it, the impact on battery degradation depending on how they are charged and discharged, market restrictions and the like.”
Shine says some investment banks, such as Investec and Lombard, understand that if asset owners can trade their batteries in short-term day-ahead or week-ahead markets, returns are higher compared with power purchase agreements. PPAs provide security in terms of a longterm contract, though the lower returns reflect the risk shouldered by the offtaker. “Banks couldn’t lend money quick enough once they ‘got’ solar, and that will happen with storage at some point,” says Shine. Some of the owners of the first batteries installed, which made good money in the fast frequency response market, are seeing those contracts come to an end. According to Shine, they are having to get their heads around earning revenues from various streams — such as frequency services, balancing mechanisms and arbitrage. “They’ll catch up, but they don’t understand it well enough yet. The internal rate of return from our as-
sets is better than anyone else’s at the moment. When they do, we’ll have moved on to a new area.”
Hunting out the opportunities
To make the most of the revenue opportunities available, energy storage system owners and operators can partner aggregators. These are energy market players that use their own specialized software to hunt out opportunities to bid for capacity from the aggregated capacity of the batteries and other assets they have available. Anesco was one of the first storage asset owners to partner an aggregator, Limejump, in April 2017. Last year it partnered EDF Energy for Clayhill. “We work with Flexitricity as well. We can see what the aggregators are doing and what others are doing because of the transparency of the markets,” Shine says. In addition to Clayhill, EDF is optimizing another two storage sites for Anesco. “We don’t just let aggregators get on with it. We review all aspects. How the battery is charged and discharged affects degradation. We are an intelligent buyer of their services,” Shine says. As well as trading power in the wholesale market, grid batteries can plump up their revenues by correcting imbalances in the system. The trick is to optimize those revenue opportunities without wearing out the battery within its operational lifetime. Storage asset owners and investors want to know how aggregators can help them optimize their assets and remove some of the risks, says Kiwi
“We are transitioning to shorter term contracts, month by month, weekly and, ultimately, day ahead. As a start-up before we wouldn’t have been able to guarantee revenues but with a company like Engie as a major shareholder, which has a deep balance sheet, we can offer a guaranteed floor price” —Simon Williamson, Kiwi Power 22 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020
Power’s commercial manager Simon Williamson. “Frequency response contracts used to be for two years. Now you’re telling investors what the battery’s revenue generation is going to look like a month beforehand. Not all investors are comfortable with such short-term contracts,” he says. There are positive signs that the National Grid will provide more volumes of fast frequency-type services. Before October 2019 average prices were £6/ MWh ($8/MWh). Since October one asset secured £60/MWh, a 10-fold increase. “We are able to bid in prices, which are not low, but go higher like £18 a MWh or £20 a MWh,” according to Williamson. “Following the August 9 black out last year, one upshot is the National Grid will seek to procure more fast response, as a relatively low-cost way to secure more capacity to avoid blackouts,” he says. The jury is out on the balancing mechanism. During a storage conference by RenewableUK, National Grid told delegates it was working on changes that would help battery storage in securing more contracts. “While the balancing mechanism does accept batteries there is a tendency to procure from larger providers of capacity,” says Williamson. “It is a market that holds promise. It is transparent so you can see what is happening and who is winning contracts. However, at the moment we are choosing not to — the risk of not being dispatched is too high compared with the reward if you are.” Foresight Group senior operations manager Jack Steven says they are moving away from the Balancing Mechanism — one of the tools used by the National Grid to balance electricity supply and demand in real time — in favour of the improved liquidity of the wholesale market. Responding to investors’ concerns about their assets’ ability to earn, some aggregators are offering guaranteed revenues for grid batteries, including Kiwi Power. “We are transitioning to shorter term contracts, month by month, weekly and, ultimately, day ahead,” says Williamson. “As a start-up before we wouldn’t have been able to guarantee revenues but with a company like Engie as a major shareholder, which has a deep balance sheet, we can offer a guaranteed floor price.” Other strategies Kiwi can offer cli-
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UK RENEWABLES AND THE GRID ents include option pricing, which enables some capacity to generate bankable revenues, guaranteed for an assigned capacity. One opportunity for the future Williamson is researching at Kiwi is a service that involves providing smaller energy suppliers with capacity if they need it. “If they need an additional 30MW in a winter peak, they pay us in advance to have that if they need it, like an insurance. Traditionally they would have to buy this from the larger generators, an expensive way to purchase that capacity. Battery owners would receive an income for being able to provide capacity. It’s conceptual at this stage.”
Preparing for the future
British solar developer Hive Energy is in the late stages of pre-construction development of a 40MW solar plant. The plant, in Romsey, Hampshire, is a potential blueprint for how solar plants can be profitable, post-subsidy. Planning permission was granted in 2017, and more recently the company has been negotiating and finalizing its financing and income. There are also plans for an up to 5MW lithium ion battery co-located nearby. The battery will also provide Hive with valuable learning in relation to monetizing energy storage. In both cases, Hive Energy’s operations director Hugh Brennan says the solar installation and the battery need a secure, long-term income. The company is negotiating with an intermediary for a sleeved power purchase agreement with a customer in the retail sector, which would be the offtaker for between 60%-70% of the solar farm’s output. In a sleeved PPA, an intermediary utility company handles the transfer of money and energy to and from a renewable energy project on behalf of the buyer. The intermediary utility takes the energy directly from the project and “sleeves” it to the buyer at its point of intake, for a fee. If the purchased renewable energy isn’t enough to meet the buyer’s energy needs, the utility is also responsible for supplying the additional power required. Separately Hive Energy has been in talks with trading houses and aggregators, such as Kiwi Power, which are able to offer a guaranteed floor price for battery revenue. “From our investigations of this market, the revenue streams for in-front-
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“From our investigations of this market, the revenue streams for in-front-of-meter batteries in the UK change almost on an annual basis. There are too many information gaps and variables.” — Hugh Brennan, Hive Energy
of-meter batteries in the UK change almost on an annual basis. There are too many information gaps and variables. You are left trying to future guess what the market will be. We want to be able to have a multi-year base price. Otherwise you are paying £400,000 ($516,000) per MW for something where the risk of it becoming a stranded asset is quite high,” says Brennan. “In the case of the corporate solar PPA and having a guaranteed floor price for the battery, both are ways of hedging. In such cases the price is not great but it is fixed for the long term. You don’t want to gamble all 100% of your investment, but nor do you want to lock in all of it. “We see one of the risks with batteries is that you are more vulnerable to someone next door doing the same thing, as they are comparatively straightforward to get permission for
and develop versus solar.” Brennan sees a clear need in the market for aggregators. They are, he says, helping to get battery projects off the ground as they find opportunities in a market that is undergoing change and can guarantee minimum revenue. Hive Energy is also developing — at least by UK standards — a ‘mega’ solar farm in Kent that will be 350MW in capacity. Slated to begin operation in late 2021 or early 2022, there is also the potential to co-locate a 50MW battery at a later date. “We’ve been interested in storage for several years and it feels like batteries and solar go hand-in-hand. But then you get down to the finer details, for example, doing a hybrid solarplus-battery project in the UK where the solar is charging the battery doesn’t make sense as there isn’t a case for time-shifting yet.”
UK BATTERY GROWTH POTENTIAL 10.6GW — total cumulative capacity of battery storage planning applications as of December 2019.
Up from 6.9GW in 2018 Increasing from just 2MW of applications in 2012
Source: Renewable UK.
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UK RENEWABLES AND THE GRID
Shaping the frontier of the new energy landscape Aggregators have grown out of energy technology start-ups, specializing in finding revenue opportunities for grid batteries and other assets, optimizing them as a service, while the energy market continues to shift away from long-term contracts to shorter monthly, weekly and daily markets. Gresham House Energy Storage fund, part of Gresham House Asset Management, is trying out different partners that offer these types of services. It has contracted Habitat Energy to optimize 74MW of battery capacity out of its 174MW portfolio. The 74MW Habitat will seek to monetize consists of three battery sites, the largest being the 49MW Red Scar installation, which was grid connected in December 2019. Aggregators typically buy and sell power in the day ahead, intraday and balancing markets and supplement income from these with other revenue streams, including embedded benefits and ancillary services contracts with National Grid ESO, such as fast frequency response. But it’s not simply letting aggregators parse the battery’s capacity into every available opportunity that comes along. Optimizing revenues to maximize returns comes at the cost of battery degradation. Gore Street Capital chief executive Alex O’Cinneide says: “You have a battery and you know that in three years’ time you want it to have a certain value. Within that envelope you want the battery’s revenue to be optimized through frequency response, balancing mechanism, arbitrage and other streams, for example, and you draw up a commercial agreement with the provider of those routes to market.”
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“Our approach is asset management, not simply operations and maintenance. “Batteries are simple assets, used in complex ways. We’ve invested in monitoring above and beyond what the battery management system does” — Steve Shine, Anesco Kiwi Power has been optimizing Gresham House’s 15MW Lockleaze battery near Bristol, part of Kiwi’s 80MW portfolio of energy storage assets. Alongside participating in the balancing mechanism, Kiwi Power will optimize the asset against other revenue streams, including ancillary services, automatically dispatching the asset in real-time, while evaluating the degradation cost of each market action. Kiwi Power’s Simon Williamson says: “Gresham House is an example of a new breed of investor in this space. They have invested in this sector, they have their own people. They are very sharp. You can bring the most pointed analysis and they understand it. They have a strategy and understand how to optimize.” As the revenue opportunities and streams continue to change it is having an impact on batteries. Previously when revenues mainly came from frequency response-type services such as enhanced frequency response and fast frequency response, batteries would hover around 50% state of charge, making small dispatches. Trading requires the batteries to have deeper depths of discharge. “The changing market model will make it more complex for batteries. If you are trading, how deep you dis-
charge the battery is really important. We perform our own analysis of the battery’s state of health, looking at depth and rate of discharge that helps us better understand degradation, as part of an asset management function within Kiwi Power,” Williamson says. Anesco’s executive chairman Shine says despite the academic interest and studies related to battery and cell degradation, nothing beats real-life data. “When you have cells within cassettes, with racks, within cabins, as part of a system, they behave, react and deteriorate differently in ways that cannot necessarily be predicted. “One aggregator says it will use batteries 2.8 times a day. But the wear and tear isn’t a constant line of degradation. If you push them too hard you start to get a hockey stick curve of degradation.” He says Anesco’s approach is asset management, not simply operations and maintenance. “Batteries are simple assets, used in complex ways. We’ve invested in monitoring above and beyond what the battery management system does. We have our own technicians to do maintenance work. In the case of BYD, one of our Chinese battery suppliers, we do their warranty work too. Our batteries are running at 99.4% availability, which is high.”
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COVER STORY: LITHIUM
Utilities flocking to lithium storage need to look elsewhere Lithium may have become the status quo of the energy storage world, but the primacy of its leadership is being challenged. Sceptics are suggesting that a herd mentality has been behind its mass adoption and that other technologies need a look in. Debbie Mason reports. California’s decision in December to exclude lithium-ion technology from applying for energy storage grant funding set tongues wagging in the industry. Was this a sign of noconfidence in the technology? Could a tipping point be on the cards for other technologies to come to the fore alongside lithium as grid storage options? In its Developing Non-Lithium Ion Energy Storage Technologies to Support California’s Clean Energy Goals, the California Energy Commission offered grants totalling $9 million for energy storage technologies — as long as they were not lithium. Another $2 million was offered for green electrolytic hydrogen storage systems in cus-
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tomer side-of-the-meter applications. The paper sets out clear parameters within which applications for the funding must be made, and emphasizes that technologies containing lithium “will not be considered as eligible for this group, because there is substantial national research funding already being applied to further develop lithium-ion chemistry-based technologies”. The paper explains that the emerging diverse range of applications requiring storage “cannot be met with currently fielded technologies alone, because they do not have the energy density, daily cycle capability, longevity, safety and price to be viable for the diverse set of applications that will be
needed in the state. “The timing is right for supporting emerging technologies that can outperform existing energy storage technologies because a substantial amount of the energy storage in California was installed in the last few years and will need to be upgraded or replaced in the next seven to 15 years,” the paper says. “Given that lithium technology is by far the most fielded technology in California, proposed technology providers can compete once commercialized with the expected price and performance of future Li technology systems.” California’s situation is not unique. Lithium is by far the run-away tech-
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COVER STORY: LITHIUM
“Some parties have expressed concern about technical lock-in with lithium, its specifications and how it follows a modelling whereby the decisions made start with lithium-ion without considering other technologies.” — Ben Kaun, program manager, Energy Storage and Distributed Generation with EPRI
nology for grid storage. The International Energy Agency reckons that 85% of new grid storage batteries being installed are lithium-ion. In the US, that figure is 98%, says the US-based Electric Power Research Institute. But its ubiquity doesn’t mean it’s a battery chemistry without problems. The same California paper mentions the challenges of lithium-ion, such as safety concerns, cycle life shortages, performance degradation over time and “environmental justice concerns on how some of the key materials used in Li batteries are obtained”. One expert, a consultant who has worked with utilities and battery companies for decades, spoke to ESJ on condition of anonymity. He says the number of lithium-ion units installed in the US was still ‘negligible’, and utilities were realizing that the technology was far more problematic than they had thought. “The lithium-ion units installed have been mostly for demonstration purposes,” he says. “If the technology really did what was expected, you
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would see far more being installed.” He expanded on the issues he believes lie behind the exclusion of the technology. “Safety concerns, the lack of historical data, operational problems and what to do at the end-of-life are all problems that are still being addressed. That’s one of the reasons they’re now looking at other chemistries and technologies,” he says.
California: pioneering alternatives
California, the most populous US state and also the one with the largest GDP, often leads cultural trends and government policies for the rest of the US. In 2015, the state set a target of 1.325GW energy storage to be installed by 2024. At the time this was the largest of any state, although it has now been surpassed by New York, which aims to install 3GW by 2025. It’s a lot of storage to fill. Some are saying there simply won’t be enough lithium-ion batteries to go around, with the booming EV industry taking up six times the number of batteries as
go into grid storage, according to Luis Munuera, energy policy analyst at the International Energy Agency. “There’s an immediate and largescale need for EV batteries,” he says. “They have been prioritized for high density, and grids don’t need that density. Other technologies in the pipeline, like flow batteries, could be more attractive.” The CEC’s paper mentions advanced chemistry batteries, flow batteries, fly wheels, thermal storage systems and compressed air systems as examples of candidate technologies. Austin Devaney, director of global inorganics, lithium & battery materials with international market intelligence firm IHS Markit, says utility companies are always looking for alternative technologies. “They will continue to invest in research until they find something that’s cheaper, faster, longer lasting, or whatever it might be,” he says. However, this does not mean lithium’s days in the limelight are over — just that it won’t necessarily always be the automatic choice. “The CEC is not funding lithium because it doesn’t feel it needs to,” he says. “Lithium already has automotive and consumer electrics companies who will put the money into carrying research forward in that area. “It’s project-by-project dependent, with emphasis on wind and solar. We are probably five years away from EVs and ICE cars reaching price parity. We are closer with PV and wind turbines reaching parity with natural gas because PVs backed with batteries are less costly than putting gas peaker plants in. “In grid storage there will be a whole spectrum of technologies, but they will include lithium-ion. There’s space for all.” Barry Moline, executive director of the California Municipal Utilities Association, says: “California is committed to finding and testing more viable
Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 27
COVER STORY: LITHIUM “Depending on where you are, the battery itself can be below 40% of the cost of a lithium battery installation. You have the inverter, conversion system, software — this can be up to 60% of the battery cost, and many of these costs aren’t easy to reduce.” —Energy Agency energy policy analyst Luis Munuera
storage technologies. There might be a safety concern with lithium, and there has also been a question about the availability of lithium and rare earth metals. “I see the growth of storage as the solution to natural gas, and it will develop over 10 years to improve the technology and lower the cost. I see other storage technologies expanding, although I don’t know what they will be.” Jin Noh, policy manager at the California Energy Storage Alliance, says CESA has tracked around 1,912 MW of energy storage that has been procured, contracted or operational, with most deployments expected between 2020 and 2022. He welcomes the CEC grant funding decision. “It is a positive development to expand the storage toolkit as we move towards deeper decarbonization scenarios,” he says. “The utilities have expressed an interest in exploring a wider range of technologies via pilot projects, includ-
ing by leveraging a growing pool of grant money from the CEC. “In deeper decarbonization scenarios, there may be a need for deep cycling and longer duration, even seasonal storage, such that the utilities are all positioning themselves to become familiar with alternative or emerging storage technologies such as flow, compressed air, liquid air thermal and others.” The consultant, who was sceptical about lithium’s place in grid storage, however, says he could even see a comeback for natural gas. “California has some of the highest electric power rates in the country and the utilities in there have to maintain a reliable system,” he says. “To maintain a reliable system, they will have to continue to rely on natural gas, which is by far the biggest source of electric power generation in California. I expect it to stay that way in the foreseeable future.” Ben Kaun, program manager for energy storage and distributed generation with EPRI (Energy Policy Research Institute), says: “There’s no doubt that lithium is the dominant battery technology, and 98% of new battery installations for utility grid services are still lithium-ion. “But some parties have expressed concern about a technical lock-in with lithium, its specifications and how it follows
THE CEC GUIDLELINES CEC guidelines state that grant funding applications must: • Take the technology from laboratory demonstration to prototype testing in a customer application • Address improved energy density, increased cycle performance and critical energy needs such as resiliency, reliability and improved safety • Show lower costs than currently fielded systems and better long-term or lifecycle performance • Not be fossil fuels • Not be lithium • Have reached a pre-commercial and technical readiness level (TRL) of 4 to 5 (with TRL 1-2 basic research and TRL 9 reaching system testing, launch and operations level).
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a modelling whereby the decisions made start with lithium-ion without considering other technologies. “There is some question about whether we are set out for the long haul to meet the grid challenges of the future with solely lithium as an option.” He says one of the reasons lithium has become the go-to technology in stationary storage is that the remarkable growth of the portable electronics sector has driven it forwards and is now resulting in cost reductions. “Until recently there wasn’t the market for stationary storage,” he says. “But with the huge upcoming market for EVs the costs have continued to drop. However there are still some attributes that we’d like to improve for the next generation technology, like safety and degradation — and it’s not likely to be the last technology to be adopted in grid storage. And there are some claiming they can get there and are not lithium based.” One technology that is not specifically mentioned in the CEC grant funding paper is lead acid, which has long been promoted as a grid storage option by the likes of the International Lead Association and Consortium for Battery Innovation, both based in London but with members all over the world. “We agree with the California Energy Commission that the
“We agree with the California Energy Commission that the scale of demand for energy storage requires different battery technologies, with a range of capabilities.” — CBI director Alistair Davidson.
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COVER STORY: LITHIUM scale of demand for energy storage requires different battery technologies, with a range of capabilities,” says CBI director Alistair Davidson. “Advanced lead batteries are used in many different energy storage applications across the US — and worldwide — and we are actively involved in research projects to develop the next generation of high performing batteries. “I hope the CEC will consider applications for projects promoting advanced lead batteries to help meet the demand for the diverse applications they seek to support.”
New York sets its own goal
California’s target of 1.325GW energy storage by 2024 has been more than doubled by New York, which has a mandate for 3GW to be installed by 2035, says Jason Doling, assistant director of the distributed energy resource team with NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Agency). Under the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, 70% of electricity generated must be from renewable sources by 2030, and by 2040 electricity must be 100% zero free, he says. “Within that is the requirement for 6GW of distributed solar energy by 2025, 9GW of offshore wind by 2035, 3GW of storage,” he says. “New York is one of the states that is leading in meeting the Paris Accord requirements despite a lack of leadership at the federal level.” There is a long way to go to meet that target, with just 400 storage projects in total that are operational in the state, NYSERDA says. Of those, 108 are identified commercial projects, and of these, 75 are thermal storage, leaving just 33 operational battery storage projects. However, in the pipeline is a total of 7.3GW, Doling says. “Within that the projects are all at different levels of maturity, many of which may not come to fruition because of site control issues, interconnection costs, or lack of financing,” he says. “We have incentivized 525MW of energy storage through NYSERDA.” So what technologies are the favourites to meet these goals? The vast majority are lithium-ion but NYSERDA is considering other options. “What wound up happening was the vast majority of what’s being considered today is lithium-ion because the cost declines have been so
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“Safety concerns, the lack of historical data, operational problems and what to do at the end-of-life are all problems that are still being addressed. That’s one of the reasons they’re now looking at other chemistries and technologies.” — Anon
substantial,” says Doling. “We have a couple of non-lithium technologies in deployment — there’s a flywheel for grid support, there are thermal projects, and 1,400MW of pumped hydro [which still makes up 96% of all global storage, according to the International Energy Agency]. “But, because EVs have been such a driver for lithium so much of it seems to be dominated by that. There are a lot of manufacturers and a lot of choice, and the most precipitous cost decline. “But we’re technology agnostic, so we’ve talked to flow battery manufacturers, thermal manufacturers and looked at underground hydro-type storage. “The R&D side of NYSERDA has an interest in funding non-lithium technologies because lithium is good for four to six hours’ duration but if it’s more than eight hours’ duration it becomes cost prohibitive. That’s where other battery technologies becomes more attractive.”
“There may be a need for deep cycling and longer duration, even seasonal storage, such that the utilities are all positioning themselves to become familiar with alternative or emerging storage technologies such as flow, compressed air, liquid air thermal and others.” — Jin Noh, policy manager, California Energy Storage Alliance
Key Capture Energy is installing one of the largest lithium battery installations in New York state.
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COVER STORY: LITHIUM
“Lithium can do lots of jobs, but the reality is not all jobs — and the price per kilowatt hour is very high.” — Geoffrey May, principal at Focus Consulting. Not one size can fit all
“Costs of storage are coming down but there may be a limit to how much they will be able to come down in the very long run,” says International Energy Agency energy policy analyst Luis Munuera. “Depending on where you are, the battery itself can be below just 40% of the cost of a lithium battery installation. You have the inverter, conversion system, software — this is all 60% of the battery cost, and many of these costs aren’t easy to reduce. “In fact 96% of storage is pumped hydro. Of the rest, lithium takes up more than 80% and over the next four or five years we expect to see as much pumped hydro being deployed for grid scale storage as lithium batteries in storage volume terms. “It also depends where it is — for example whether it’s in developing or developed countries. “In developed countries, the guidance is to deploy batteries more for ancillary services, power quality, frequency or voltage support and shortterm storage. But for developing countries, the need is for providing firm capacity on the grid; they need longer term storage, plug and play, have to be simple to maintain and control, and safe. Other technologies or designs may be the better option.” Munuera says that encouraging one technology over others can have negative effects because a single product can be deployed too quickly without
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realizing the local costs, whether the means are there for building it, and that there may be other costs as the project progresses. “The 18650 lihtium-ion cell format has been am industry mainstay since the first cameras ised lihtium-ion, and they’re often still used in EV batteries. There are strong spillovers from one sonic uses exactly the same cells now as it did in its first camera.” He says the imminent growth of demand for EV batteries means that
“The R&D side of NYSERDA has an interest in funding non-lithium technologies because lithium is good for four to six hours’ duration but if it’s more than eight hours’ duration it becomes cost prohibitive.” — Jason Doling, assistant director of the Distributed Energy Resource Team with NYSERDA
there are six times more batteries being made for that application than there are for grid applications. When it comes to costing longer duration batteries, it is necessary to reach below the basic costs — the costs of the materials — to really start considering lithium-ion for longer term use, he says. “We might see lithium batteries lasting for several days, but in the very long term,” he says. “But it doesn’t mean it’s not possible.” “Lithium can do lots of jobs, but the reality is not all jobs — and the price per kilowatt hour is very high,” says Geoffrey May, principal at Focus Consulting. “If you want batteries for frequency regulation it performs quite well and that application can withstand a higher price point in terms of dollars per MWh. “If you want longer term storage, with time shifting and so on, if you are going to have solar and wind as the mainstay of the power system, you have got to have some hours at least of energy storage on the network. “As the deployment of renewables increases, the need for storage increases. But the price point continues to go down. If you look at other technologies, some claim the price point is lower, which is interesting. For example some are zinc based, and some of the systems are pretty good and have different providers and developers. “Flow battery technologies only come into play if they can have a really long life, for instance vanadium redox flow systems. And don’t forget lead. It has an intrinsically lower price point compared to the claims of lithium providers that it has a shorter life. “The best-in-class Japanese batteries from Hitachi and GS Yuasa, brands you can trust, can provide lead for energy storage with 70% depth of discharge and 4,500 to 5,000 cycles. “In stationary storage energy density doesn’t matter volumetrically — if you have a 50% bigger footprint for your battery on a remote site at a large substation it’s not a major issue.” So why, given all these disadvantages, is lithium still so popular? “The answer in part is there’s an element of going for the newest, the sexiest of technologies — a lot of which are still publicly funded,” says May. “If you are looking for a grant you might not want to push older technologies even if you know it’s perfectly good. At the end of the day I suspect there isn’t always a logic for it.”
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COVER STORY: LITHIUM
Lithium is the only realistic option — Stanley Whittingham “There’s no question that I would recommend lithium batteries for grid storage,” says Stanley Whittingham, one of the three inventors of the rechargeable lithium battery, along with John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino, who all won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry last year. He knew then that there would be a future in grid storage for the chemistry, although there was little of it around. “There was very little grid storage of any sort — the largest was telephone companies using them for back-up with lead acid, but there’s a huge amount of maintenance required in lead batteries, and that’s their major problem, along with lifetime,” he said. “Grid storage was in our minds — and it hasn’t changed; I still use the same slide to describe it now as I used in the 1970s.” Whittingham is a professor of Chemistry and Materials Science at Binghamton University in New York. British by birth, he has lived in the US since 1968, and still speaks with an English accent. “In New York State at least three gigawatts of grid storage will be in place within the next half dozen years. There are a number of facilities going in right now, and one at Saratoga Springs will have 12 hours’ storage capacity,” he says. The Saratoga Springs lithium battery, being installed by Key Capture Energy, is a 20MW utilityscale battery which when completed will be the largest in New York State. “There is no limit to how much storage capacity you can have,” Whittingham says. “You simply add cells and plan how fast you take the energy out. “I keep being asked about life — will they last 10 or 20 years — but actually it’s not the battery life that’s going to matter with renewable energy. With wind turbines, for
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There is no limit to how much storage capacity you can have. You simply add cells and plan how fast you take the energy out. — says Nobel Laureate example, the blades, I’m being told, are lasting maybe four or five years and they’re not recyclable. I think the life of the battery is going to outlast the wind farms.” Whittingham was working for Exxon Energy when he made his
battery breakthrough, and at the time it was the largest manufacturer of solar panels in the US — long before ‘renewable energy’ was being considered on the scale it is today. “They put solar panels on the trans-Australia railroad,” he says, “and remote applications like railroads had to have storage. I suspect it was lead acid. So what about the recycling issue? One of the main arguments from the lead battery industry is that lead batteries are 99% recycled whereas lithium batteries are simply being stockpiled. Others, such as American Manganese and Umicore, say recycling is already taking place. And in March 2019, the Argonne National Laboratory and the US Department of Energy claimed its new research centre was working on recycling lithium batteries in a way that could be cost effective — even profitable — within three years. “There are a number of recycling facilities in the US, and I would be very surprised if there weren’t many in Europe,” says Whittingham. “New ones are starting up all the time. Here in New York State it’s illegal to throw electronics in the garbage. “There is much value in certainly all smartphone batteries, less so in some of the larger batteries, where there is less cobalt. But all batteries are going to have to be collected, then recycled. “Right now lithium is the lowest when you’re looking at lifetime costs. There might be some other things that will compete with it and make a breakthrough in grid storage, but not for another five to 10 years. “The best way of storing electrical energy is pumped hydro, but no one in the US or the UK wants to build any more plants because of space and environment concerns. “In the US there’s no question lithium is charging ahead at full speed.”
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LITHIUM
With one lithium battery fire happening every week on US planes, and reports of large fires in energy storage installations around the world, should they be used in the grid? Debbie Mason reports.
Lithium: a fiery and uncomfortable truth From January 2006, when the US Federal Aviation Administration began keeping records, until the end of 2019, 264 incidents had been recorded on aeroplanes where lithium batteries exploded or caught fire. Over 14 years that’s an average of 18.8 per year, but the numbers take on a different meaning when you consider the fact that 54% of them happened in the last three years. In the first month of 2020 four incidents were recorded, and if this can be assumed to be an average across the year, the number will increase to 48 for 2020: one almost every week. These are little fires — the odd laptop or cellphone — and most often e-cigarettes (which aren’t even permitted to be switched on) or USB chargers are the culprits, says George Brilmyer, R&D manager at battery separator firm Microporous. He is an expert in lithium battery fires, having invented a portable box device that contains them when they go off. “A laptop has six lithium batteries in it,” he says. “A Tesla will have 6,000. But a utility-scale battery could have 60,000, all heating up in massive containers when the air conditioning that is supposed to keep them cool breaks down, or something else happens.” As it did at the Arizona Public Service Company, twice, once in 2012 when the failure of a battery management system was blamed for a fire, and again last year, in April, when four firefighters had to be treated in hospital for burns after attending to the McMicken Energy Storage Facility in Surprise. The two incidents prompted Arizona regulator Sandra Kennedy to
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write to the APS to say lithium batteries should not be used at utility scale, and that a 250MW lithium ion battery had an energy equivalent of 215 tonnes of TNT. In South Korea, 522 grid installations were dismantled after a string of incidents beginning in 2017 saw more than 20 catch fire. “These were installed by reputable firms,” says Brilmyer. “But people have been going blindly down this road, that they have to have lithium ion. Yet it’s killed people! “We have been researching how to deal with lithium-ion fires since 1994 when the first one blew. Lithium iron phosphate was supposed to do that,
“People have been going blindly down this road, that they have to have lithium ion. Yet it’s killed people!” – George Brilmyer
it was supposed to make it safer. But it’s just a version of lithium-ion. The electrolyte in the battery is still flammable, like fingernail polish remover. “Water doesn’t put it out but if you dump the entire battery in some you cool the reaction down and it stops temporarily. In a Tesla, the fire goes out, the fire department puts foam and water on the vehicle, it stops burning, they tow it back to the repair shop and it explodes and burns the repair shop down. “What they are doing now is bringing an open-top dumpster, putting a plastic pseudo bath tub in it, filling it with water, getting a crane to lift the whole car and put it into this portable swimming pool, and after it’s been in there for an hour you’re pretty safe.” It is possible that not all the claims of batteries causing the flames are entirely accurate. A report by market intelligence firm S&P Global reported that investigations into the South Korean fires showed the batteries themselves were not in fact the cause of the blazes. “An expert panel has blamed poor quality installations, faulty operating procedures, missing protections against electrical shocks and lack of overall control systems, several South Korean media outlets reported,” S&P Global said. “The probe also revealed manufacturing defects in lithium-ion battery cells from one undisclosed manufacturer, but did not find that those flaws ignited the fires.” However, battery manufacturers were still being held to account, the firm quoted electrical engineering professor Kin Jung-hoon, who headed the investigating committee, as
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LITHIUM
saying. “Battery manufacturers, system integrator companies and power conversion system companies are all at fault,” he was quoted as telling a press conference.
Lithium ban in NYC
In New York City, which operates its own codes independently from that of New York State, lead acid batteries are the only type that can be installed inside buildings, including in garages next to people’s homes. Where lithium batteries are concerned, while not specifically banned per se, “there is no defined process to get them permitted”, says Jason Doling, assistant director of the Distributed Energy Resource team with NYSERDA. New York City Rules’ guidelines and procedures for safe outdoor battery installation, operation and maintenance cover lithium-ion, flow, nickel cadmium and metal hydride batteries — but the rules are explicit that they do ‘not govern indoor battery installations’. “Because of their energy density, lithium-ion batteries are increasingly being used in a wide range of applications, including consumer products,” say the Rules, published by the Mayor’s office. “However, lithium-ion batteries are subject to thermal runaway, which occurs when the heat generated by a malfunctioning energy cell or module causes others to fail, potentially generating intense fires and fires that reignite after being extinguished. Various highly publicized incidents have illustrated the fire safety concerns associated with lithium-ion batteries.” “In New York State there have been places where lithium has or will be installed indoors, but New York City follows its own fire code and has these concerns about putting it indoors today,” says NYSERDA’s Doling. “They really want to see testing and listings through underwriters’ labs before they’ll see those systems go indoors. But I don’t want to say that they can’t be installed safely because that’s not true. “When we talk about what’s in the pipeline, most lithium systems are inside a structure, a big 40ft shipping container, or inside a big building that’s specifically constructed to house batteries.
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“There are clearly Li-ion systems being installed in special purpose buildings and even in residential installations in places throughout the state, it’s just that New York City is highly sensitive to these things because of how dense the building environment is.” “It’s important to recognize that even if other lithium technologies have some attributes that make them less susceptible to thermal runaway and explosions, the self-heating that causes thermal runaway is possible in all types of lithium technologies,” says Ben Kaun, program manager, Energy Storage and Distributed Generation, with EPRI. “There really needs to be a systematic view of safety. There are other industries who deal with hazardous materials and mechanisms all the time — but it does require a serious system.” “The simple fact is that lithium with an organic electrolyte in energy density is always going to be more dangerous,” says Geoffrey May, director of Focus Consulting. “If you are putting a battery in commercial premises I think there would be some insurance concerns there — would you be happy if you had such a large battery in the basement of an office complex?” “It’s important to put fire risk in batteries, including lithium-ion, into perspective,” says Doling. “There are about 150,000 vehicle fires a year in the US and we’re still driving cars that run on gasoline. We have natural gas explosions but we’re still using natural gas. The events get a lot of attention because it’s a new technology, but there are multiple gigawatts of lithium-ion systems operating today.” “The bottom line is that if you are storing energy, it’s inherently unsafe, it doesn’t matter what currency you store it in,” says lithium battery inventor Stanley Whittingham. “If the dam breaks with pumped hydro you’re in trouble, or if your gas catches fire, and lead batteries are just as bad if not worse, because they over-
“NYC has these concerns about putting lithium indoors today.” – Jason Doling charge, generate hydrogen and explode — and they’re full of sulfuric acid as well. “People have to be trained in how to deal with them, and it depends on their size. On aeroplanes they put them in iced water. In some cases, like Teslas, it’s best just to let them burn. In gas cars you have the same issue — put too much water on them and you spread the gasoline everywhere. “Labs have protocols, fire chiefs have protocols, training symposia, safety officers — so they know what a lithium battery is and how to handle it. “The best place for batteries for buildings is the roof, but fire chiefs don’t want them higher than their ladders can reach, which is a problem for skyscrapers as you’d have to put them on the fourth or fifth floor and make the entire building fireproof. “But there’s no question that we need storage. New York is doing a big study to see what’s best. Hospitals, for example, all want storage built in them. “There are temperature problems, yes — but all these things can be solved.”
“The bottom line is that if you are storing energy, it’s inherently unsafe. It doesn’t matter what currency you store it in.” – Stanley Whittingham.
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OPINION: IHS MARKIT Julian Jansen, research & analysis manager, Energy Storage, with IHS Markit, reckons that although regulatory challenges and project declines led to a slump in annual storage installations last year, the market is now ready to accelerate.
The inevitability of a market surge 2018 was a record year for the deployment of gridconnected battery energy storage. Global installations almost doubled, especially driven by growth in South Korea and China. However, in 2019 the number of installations declined by 28% compared to 2018. A total of 2.7GW of gridconnected batteries were deployed globally in 2019, but annual installations will grow to more than 12GW by 2025, we predict. The main causes for the subdued market performance were manifold, including project delays, regulatory changes and safety concerns. South Korea, once the largest market for energy storage, saw almost no deployment in 2019 following 28 battery fires between late 2017 and September 2019. There were few new installations. At the same time, uncertainty over the continuation of existing subsidies further impacted the market’s outlook. In mainland China, installations of new energy storage projects contracted by 54% in 2019, following a record 484MW of new additions in 2018, further highlighting the dependence of energy storage markets on political and regulatory decisions. A decision by the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission to ex-
clude energy storage assets from the grid’s transmission tariff calculations led to a sudden halt in new standalone transmission and distribution battery energy storage projects. In the US — to be the largest global market in the coming three years — major project delays meant total additions slowed in 2019. Growth will resume in 2020 and onwards, especially as demand in the US ramps up, due to strong uptake in utility-scale solar plus storage driven by the Investment Tax Credit.
Stationary energy storage
However, the outlook for energy storage remains strong, with cumulative installations of grid-connected battery energy storage predicted to reach 64GW/179GWh in 2025. Behind this growth is the fact that energy storage is starting to provide value across a greater range of applications. The outlook in Europe strengthened, driven by merchant wholesale revenue streams opening in the UK, the Irish DS3 tender highlighting the long-term requirements for storage on the island. In the US, four-hour duration battery energy storage is becoming a competitive capacity resource compared to
institutional investors are becoming comfortable investing ... reducing the cost of financing and opening new market opportunities newbuild gas-based generation, while utilities are also starting to see its capability as a flexible and cost-effective alternative to traditional T&D reinforcement.
Enter the money men
As the market matures, institutional investors are backing the energy storage industry. In 2019, $1.9 billion of private equity investments in energy storage were announced, compared to $1.2 billion in 2018. There has also been a big increase in activities from multilateral and institutional investors with combined investments of more than $1 billion announced in 2019. These companies are becoming comfortable investing in this space as the market matures and business models are proven, which is reducing the cost of financing and opening new market opportunities. With more than half of the states in the US adopting renewable energy goals, and states such as California targeting 100% clean energy by 2045, the need for storage — and especially long-duration
bulk storage — is becoming more pressing. This is evidenced by ever increasing amounts of curtailed renewable electricity. Finding ways to better match the supply of abundant low-cost renewable generation with demand throughout the year will require longer duration storage, including multi day and seasonal storage. Without significant deployment of long duration storage, clean energy policy goals will not be met. Lithium-ion batteries account for some 90% of installed battery energy storage capacity, are becoming feasible for up to eight hours of storage. Beyond that costs become prohibitive and technology characteristics less favourable, highlighting the need for alternatives such as other battery chemistries, mechanical and thermal technologies and hydrogen from renewable energy. Policy makers and regulators should thus incentivize a wide range of technologies and foster cross-industry collaboration to drive their deployment.
IHS Markit has more than 50,000 business and government customers, including 80% of the Fortune Global 500 and the world’s leading financial institutions.
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PROJECT NEWS: CAES/LAES Compressed or liquefied air can be used as a medium for large-scale energy storage. Historically the technology found little favour — until now, writes Hillary Christie.
Compressed air energy storage: a new twist on an old technology In November, Canadian firms Hydrostor and energy storage firm NRStor announced the completion of their first commercial CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage) facility. The Goderich plant, in Ontario, provides 1.75MW of peak power output and more than 10MWh of storage capacity in what is being hailed as the first utility-scale commercial application of A-CAES technology. “This facility serves as an important proof point for A-CAES on the global stage, enabling the build-out of Hydrostor’s full-scale project pipeline in Canada, the USA, Chile, Australia and other markets,” said Hydrostor CEO Curtis VanWalleghem. The technology works by using electricity from the grid to run an air compressor, producing heated compressed air. The heat is extracted from the air stream and stored for later use on discharge. The cooled compressed air is then sent underground and stored in a cavern. When the grid needs energy, the
air is brought back to the surface, recollects the stored heat and is expanded through an air turbine to generate power on demand. The project was supported by Export Development Canada, a government-owned export credit agency, and received funding from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, a foundation created by the government to fund new clean technologies. Hydrostor, which was founded in 2010, says it has three projects in operation or under construction in Canada and Australia, and utilityscale projects ranging in capacity from 20MW-500MW across the US, Canada, Chile and Australia. Australia’s government gave the goahead last July for the country’s first compressed air energy storage facility, to be provided by Hydrostor’s Australian subsidiary. The 5MW Angas A-CAES project, costing A$30 million ($20.7 million), to be sited at the Angas Zinc Mine near Adelaide, will provide syn-
chronous inertia, load shifting and frequency regulation to support grid security and reliability for Australia’s National Electricity Market. The project will repurpose existing underground mining infrastructure to install the sub-surface compressed air system, thus converting an unused brownfield site to a clean energy project. A total of A$9 million ($6.2 million) in grant funding has been awarded to Hydrostor for the project, A$6 million from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and A$3 million from the government of South Australia through its Renewable Technology Fund. “Compressed air storage has the potential to provide similar benefits to pumped hydro energy storage, however it has the added benefits of being flexible with location and topography, such as utilizing a cavern already created at a disused mine site,” said Australian Renewable Energy Agency CEO Darren Miller. Compressed air will be stored in the
The 400MWh US system by Highview follows on from the announcement of a 250MWh system in the UK.
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PROJECT NEWS: CAES/LAES
“This facility serves as an important proof point for A-CAES on the global stage, enabling the buildout of Hydrostor’s full-scale project pipeline in Canada, the USA, Chile, Australia and other markets” Curtis Vanwelleghem, CEO of Hydrostor
underground cavern, which is kept at a constant pressure using a hydrostatic head from a water column. During charging, compressed air displaces water out of the cavern up a water column to a surface reservoir, and during discharge water flows back into the cavern forcing air to the surface under pressure, where it is reheated using the stored heat and then expanded through a turbine to generate electricity on demand. Hydrostor may be making the first commercial CAES but other firms are also active in the business — moving away from demonstration projects to commercial ventures. The latest such venture using liquefied air was announced in December with a partnership from Highview Power and Encore Renewable Energy with plans to develop the United States’ first long duration, liquid air energy storage system. This facility will be a minimum of 50MW, provide more than eight hours of storage (400MWh) and will be in northern Vermont. “The project is the first of many utility-scale, liquid air energy storage projects that we plan to develop
across the US to help scale up renewable energy deployment,” said a Highview official. “The Vermont facility will contribute to resolving the longstanding energy transmission challenges surrounding the state’s Sheffield-Highgate Export Interface (SHEI) and enable the efficient transport of excess power from renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, to help integrate them on the power grid. “This includes the ability to store energy for weeks at the lowest levellized cost of long duration storage in the industry, providing what is called ‘gridsynchronous inertia,’ which balances electrical demand and supply. Other services the facility can deliver include market arbitrage, frequency management, reserve, and grid constraint management services.” Highview Power has also been busy in the UK and the firm announced in October that it plans to construct the UK’s first commercial liquid air energy storage facility. The 50MW/250 MWh project will be located at a decommissioned thermal power station in the north of England. Highview Power has already built
NEW WAYS FOR PUMPED HYDRO The principle of pumped hydro — use energy to pump water up a slope and catch some of that energy through turbines on its way down — can be applied in a variety of other ways. What happens say when you put energy into pushing a train with heavy weights up a slope and capture electricity when it’s released? Or hoist a huge weight up a pit shaft and use pulleys to catch the energy on its release. Or pump air into a cavern and use the escaping air to drive turbines and generate power? All of these techniques — and a few others listed here —are now either being designed or are already commercially available. One interesting start-up is Gravity Power which, based in California, has devised a system that relies on two water-filled shafts, one wider than the other, which are connected at both ends. Water is pumped down through the smaller shaft to raise a piston in the larger shaft. When demand peaks, the piston is allowed to sink back down the main shaft, forcing water through a generator to create electricity.
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The system’s relatively compact nature means it can be installed close to areas of high demand, and extra modules can be added when more capacity is needed. Another bright spark on the horizon, working on a similar principle, comes from a UK start-up called Gravitricity with a simple variation of pumped hydro. Instead of water being pumped up a hill, a large weight of up to 3,000 tonnes is raised/dropped from the bottom of a disused mine shaft. Gravitricity plans to equip these long-abandoned mine shafts with enormous weights and winches. Surplus power will be drawn from the grid to raise the underground weights closer to ground level. When the time comes to inject energy back into the grid, the weights can be released for a burst of power generation. The firm says the output duration can be between 15 minutes and eight hours. Although this is similar to pumped hydro it has one extra benefit — an almost instant (one second) response to fluctuations as well as a potential degradation-free operational lifespan
of 50 years. Innovate UK, the British government funded agency, awarded the start-up a £650,000 ($1 million) grant in 2018. A full scale demonstrator is being developed and the firm hopes to install a full-scale prototype by 2020. Managing director Charlie Blair says the difference with pumped hydro is that, “we don’t need a mountain with a loch or lake at the top, and we can react much faster to the need for power.” He says the biggest single cost is the hole, and that is why the start-up is developing its technology using existing mine shafts, in the UK and also in South Africa. He reckons that as the technology advances, the cost of drilling will reduce significantly and will allow them to sink purpose-built shafts wherever they are required. The firm plans to build models from 1MW to 20MW. Gravitricity managing director Charlie Blair: “The difference between pumped hydro is that we don’t need a mountain with a loch or lake at the top, and we can react much faster”
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PROJECT NEWS: CAES/LAES and connected two LAES plants to the UK grid, one of which is the world’s largest storage plant of its kind and provides 15MWh of support to the grid during winter demand peaks. The company uses a liquid air energy storage system dubbed CRYOBattery. The firm says this offers a levelized cost of storage of $140/MWh for a 10-hour, 200MW/2 GWh system. Accompanying this is Highview’s BLU core controller system, which allows the battery to be configured to particular applications, and provides operation and performance monitoring feedback. Javier Cavada, CEO of Highview Power, says: “Highview Power’s mission today and in the future is to address the growing demand for energy storage, the ways in which consumption is changing, and the issue of increasing intermittency. CRYOBattery offers an affordable, scalable solution that can store energy for many hours — even days.” Unlike competing long-duration technologies, the CRYOBattery can be sited just about anywhere and has a small footprint, even at multiple gigawatt-levels. “CRYOBattery can be easily scaled to multiple gigawatts by simply adding more tanks. The technology operates without size limitations or geographic constraints,” says Cavada. The facility could offer additional services such as market arbitrage, frequency management, reserve, and grid constraint management. Highview is seeking additional sites across Europe and the US to develop similar large-scale projects, all to have a capacity of 50MW/250MWh. LAES does not come without its challenges. One such problem is its poor round-trip efficiency. Both liquefying the air and expanding it require electricity; the processes also produce waste energy in the form of hot and cold air. In the case of Highview Power, efficiency is maintained at around 70%, says the firm, by using the waste heat and cold. Thermal stores can be used to capture the heat produced during liquefaction and the cooling produced during electricity generation, and some companies have achieved this by integrating LAES with industrial refrigeration. The European Union-funded Cryohub project aims to do just that by capturing excess cold and heat in a thermal store. The team, which in-
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cludes partners from five countries, mapped refrigerated warehouses across Europe looking for a feasible and economical site for their first pilot project, due to be built in 2020. By integrating renewable energy generation and LAES with existing cold-storage systems, the project claims to have doubled its round-trip efficiency to 50%. CAES technology is not new, though with the pressing need for greater energy storage, its importance has risen to the surface. The 310MW Huntorf facility in Germany, for example, was built in 1978, and is one of only two utilityscale CAES plants in operation. The second is a 110MW plant in McIntosh Alabama, which was built as long ago as 1991. This uses nuclear plant-generated night-time power for compression and produces peak power during the day. Huntorf makes use of two underground salt caverns, which are filled up over several hours and tapped when electricity is needed. The compressed air is released and is heated by burning natural gas to get the air to expand to drive a huge turbine that generates electricity for two hours, before the process can start over again. UK start-up firm Storelectric is looking at exploiting disused underground salt caverns to store the air, of which there are many in Britain. “For CAES to be really economic, developers in the field have focused on increasing the efficiency of CAES by holding on to and reusing the stored thermal energy to heat the air for expansion, rather than waste this energy and burn fuel, which adds to the cost of the recovered electrical energy and makes the sustainable benefits of such a storage technique questionable,” says the firm. One problem that faces alternative energy storage forms (but not that of CAES and LAES) at the grid level is that of scalability. LAES can store enough electricity to power thousands of homes for decades. At this scale, regular electrochemical batteries become too large and expensive. (Despite this, the majority of investment is still going to lithium-ion.) At a recent conference in Birmingham covering the battery and energy storage industries, panellists discussed the lack of investment in renewable energy and called on regulatory and market stability to address the issue. Also suggested was a need for sector coupling and cross-sector collaboration.
LAES: HOW IT WORKS Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) — also known as Cryogenic Energy Storage — can offer long-duration, gigawatt scale storage. This is where air or nitrogen is liquified and stored in low-pressure, vacuuminsulated tanks before being returned to a gaseous state. This gas is then used to power a turbine and generate electricity. The system of LAES—likened to a pressure cooker in reverse — involves three core processes. First, a liquefier uses electrical energy to draw air from the environment before cleaning and cooling it to sub-zero temperatures until it liquefies. The volume is reduced until 700 litres of ambient air becomes 1 litre of liquid air. The liquid air is stored at low pressure in tanks similar to those used in the industrial-gas sector. The tanks, already globally deployed for bulk storage of liquid nitrogen, oxygen and LNG, store the potential energy until electricity is needed. When power is required, liquid air is drawn from the tanks and pumped to high pressure. Through a heat exchanger the compressed air is evaporated, superheated and brought back to a gaseous state. The resulting high-pressure gas can then be used to drive an electricitygenerating turbine. Julian Jansen, research manager at IHS Markit, says that nowadays the need is to focus on the value that energy storage provides to the market, rather than focusing on the cost of implementation. Other companies are exploring energy storage solutions using technologies similar to LAES. For example, Keuka Energy, a Florida company exploring wind-powered renewable energy solutions, has developed a technology that eliminates the need for a gear box in conventional wind turbines, potentially lowering the long-term cost of running the machines. Keuka stores its excess energy as liquid air, to address the issue of intermittency. LAES can also work well when tied with other industries; efficiency can be improved in the superheating phase by using industrial waste heat/cold from thermal generation plants, steel mills and LNG terminals.
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EVENT REVIEW: INTERSOLAR INDIA, EES INDIA, POWER2DRIVE INDIA Intersolar India, ees India and Power2Drive India Bangalore, India • November 27-29, 2019
The smarter E India: innovations for the new energy world The smarter E India, the innovation hub for empowering new energy solutions, featured riveting discussions between industry pioneers in the fields of solar, energy storage and electric mobility. The three co-located exhibitions — Intersolar India, ees India and Power2Drive India — celebrated their debut in Bangalore, November 27-29, 2019. The high-level conferences featured 30 sessions and workshops, including the new two-day Power2Drive Conference, organized in partnership with Energy Alternatives India. Conference sessions, stage presentations, workshops and conversations on the exhibition floor were dominated by the same key theme: the intersection where renewable energy technologies meet will give way to a treasure trove of new service opportunities and enable a more sustainable, reliable and resilient energy mix for India’s future generations. India has embarked on one of the world’s largest renewable energy capacity expansion programs.
India’s energy and mobility transformation
The ambitious target is to achieve an installed capacity of renewable based power of 175GW by 2022, with
100GW of solar. The roll-out of large scale applications like floating solar, agro PV and grid scale storage are among the new frontiers opened up in India. Many challenges cropped up on the way, particularly in 2018, which stifled the growth. Nevertheless, with the support of the government, earning another term and being committed to renewable energy, and if the challenges of the past are addressed expeditiously, India’s energy and mobility transformation could be among the fastest in the world. After a year of elections, changes and uncertainty in the Indian renewable market, researchers and industry leaders delivered comments that offered a bold and optimistic take on the future for solar, energy storage and e-mobility technologies, and reminded attendees of the industries’ accomplishments and long history of innovation.
Versatile applications between grid empowerment and electrification of transportation
Energy storage is crucial for managing the grid with large renewable energy penetration. The challenges of integrating energy storage systems to the grid are similar to but more complex than integrating PV and wind resources.
After a year of elections, changes and uncertainty in the Indian renewable market, researchers and industry leaders delivered comments that offered a bold and optimistic take on the future for solar, energy storage and e-mobility technologies.
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Like PV and wind, energy storage systems are new to customers, utilities, regulators and electric system operators. This creates a kind of inertia that must be overcome with a significant amount of outreach from manufacturers and system integrators on the role energy storage can play as a flexible resource that can improve the reliability and resiliency of the electric grid.
Energy storage’s role in the future grid
The future grid will need large amounts of storage across all market segments. For example, Wood Mackenzie projects that energy storage deployments will grow 13fold over the next six years, from a 12 GWh market in 2018 to a 158 GWh market in 2024. Barring large-scale economic or political dislocations in the world, these numbers appear likely to be met. The future grid must be instrumented to be able to handle bi-directional power flows on a scale that we have not thought through. This not only includes the need for a robust communication infrastructure at every point of generation, delivery and end use, but also reliable market mechanisms to account for complex power flows. We are still in an early stage in getting storage deployed in the grid on a large scale.
Grid-scale energy vs storage systems for EVs
Batteries for EVs have different attributes than stationary storage. Light-weight, higher energy density and higher voltage are required for electric vehicles. There is limited flexibility in the size and shape
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EVENT REVIEW: INTERSOLAR INDIA, EES INDIA, POWER2DRIVE INDIA
From a grid perspective, the major question is how we handle large-scale electrification of transport and the upgrades needed in the distribution system infrastructure required to accommodate fast charging. required for EV batteries. Size is a major factor, with most EVs requiring nothing larger than a 100 kWh battery. For EVs, the industry is converging towards using Li-ion batteries. For grid applications, the need is for a range of solutions that scale in size from kW to multi-MW systems, with a span of applications that cover energy and power markets that range from the residential to multi MW/MWh grid applications. From a grid perspective, the major question is how we handle large-scale electrification of transport and the upgrades needed in the distribution system infrastructure required to accommodate fast charging. With major auto companies committing to electrify large portions of the fleet, there is a wide-ranging expectation that we may see electrified passenger car fleets reaching 130-230 million vehicles globally. There is also significant drive to electrify bus and other public transport systems. Electric vehicles will drive electricity demand growth. If the forecast of fleet growth is anywhere close to projections, we may overload distribution systems and cause serious transmission congestion. In some markets, we may see total load doubling. Strengthening the distribution systems and providing additional flexible resources for large C&I customers and also integrating significant ES resources at distribution substations would be necessary. Electricity demand under large-scale electrification of vehicles will see an increase in peak demand, though this could be somewhat mitigated under ideal vehicle charging conditions. Even if we see 20%-30% electrification in the US, that represents 50-80 million vehicles, and 5-10TWh of energy storage capacity on the vehicles. Thus, providing rapid charging infrastructure would require significant investments in distribution systems, including a large amount of energy storage, and improved communications infrastructure to reliably manage power flows.
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Emerging new battery technologies ahead
There is a range of battery technologies for short duration energy storage from seconds to days. These include Li-ion, advanced lead acid, NaS and other mature battery chemistries. Flow batteries are beginning to be deployed for longer duration (>4hr) energy applications. Researchers are excited about rechargeable zinc-manganese oxide batteries. Zn-MnO2 alkaline batteries, traditionally primary batteries at <$20/kWh with long shelf life, have the lowest bill of materials cost, low manufacturing capital expenses and an established supply chain for high volume manufacturing. These batteries can be produced in large format cells with sizes that are inherently well suited for grid energy storage. Alkaline batteries also do not have the temperature limitations of Li-ion or lead-acid batteries, thereby removing the need for complicated thermal management systems, and providing simpler systems with lower integration costs. Traditional Na-based batteries, such as NaS and Na-NiCl2, have been deployed in the grid infrastructure for many years. Reducing the cost of these batteries is a critical challenge to making these technologies more competitive. These batteries typically operate near 300°C to maintain suitable ionic conductivity of solid-state ceramic separators and to ensure the molten state of both the Na anode and the molten salt catholytes. These elevated temperatures, though, require relatively expensive sealing and packaging and increase operational and maintenance costs. The development of a lower temperature of molten Na-halide batteries that operate near or below 100°C is therefore an R&D focus. That would extend battery life while facilitating the use of low cost, widely available packaging, and safe, new, highly cyclable battery chemistries. Flow batteries are being deployed
Scenes from ees India
for longer duration storage. There are still a number of challenges with this technology. Further improvements are needed in improving energy density and improved system reliability. Current research is on the development of electrolytes with improved energy density and development of lower cost polymeric membranes.
Mumbai calling
The next ees India will be held in parallel to Intersolar and Power2Drive India, taking place in Mumbai, December 15–17, 2020. ees India will focus on batteries and electrical energy storage technologies and systems attracting investors, utilities, installers, manufacturers and project developers from all over the world. It belongs to the exhibition trio The smarter E India — India’s innovation hub for the new energy world.
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EVENT REVIEW: UK BATTERY & ENERGY STORAGE UK Battery & Energy Storage • Birmingham, UK •. December 4-5, 2019
The boom years beckon but still much for industry to do
“It will take a very long time for us to reach a state where we are confronted by mountains of Li-ion waste” — Hans Eric Melin, Circular Energy Storage
“We are looking for the regulatory stability and market stability necessary for renewables to flourish.” — Nick Heyward, Statkraft
Projects in the pipeline, include a vehicle-to-grid charging project, E-Flex, and Home Response, a twoyear pilot testing energy solutions in around 160 London homes — Shaun Gibbons, Greater London Authority
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A December report by Renewable-UK, the energy trade association, says more than 10,500MW of battery storage planning applications were made in 2019, up from just under 6,900MW a year ago. This is a remarkable number given that in 2012 there were just 2MW of applications, the report says. Such rapid acceleration means there is more of a need for collaboration and co-operation across the energy sector than ever before, and this was one of the key themes coming out of this year’s Battery and Energy Storage Conference in Birmingham, England. Touted by organizer Internet of Business as the only cross-industry event in the UK, it is the third annual event and this year the number of registered attendees rose to 160. In the opening panel looking at industry developments since 2018, senior consultant at DNV-GL, said that for the UK market to become competitive, it needed a more functional supply chain. Other opening panellists included senior energy analyst Lara Juergens, from the Energy Industries Council; Clean Horizon Consulting’s head of market analysis, Corentin Baschet; and Martin Bowson, Battery Systems lead with the Warwick Manufacturing Group. They stressed the importance of cross-sectional markets and the need for energy storage to mix with the renewables industry, as well as funding hurdles. “The Faraday Institution is doing great things in research and development within the auto industry; it would be great for that funding to diversify into other sectors,” said Chris Lawley a senior consultant at DNVGL. William Kirk-Wilson, operability strategy manager at the National Grid, said batteries and storage were essential to meet challenges for the utility in terms of frequency control, voltage control, restoration, and stability. A panel then discussed how, through collaboration with the National Grid, utility providers could create value
from investing in renewable energy. Nick Heyward, head of UK Storage at hydropower company Statkraft, said: “We are looking for the regulatory stability and market stability necessary for renewables to flourish.”
Working with local governments A late morning panel including representatives from Nottingham, Coventry and Greater London city councils discussed the need for sector coupling and cross-sector collaboration. “In the industry there appears to be more talk more than action,” said panel chair Julian Hansen, senior market analyst from information firm HIS Markit. “We need strategies and plans to be translated into actual projects, and that can be realized by local authorities working together and collaborating with the private sector.” He said progress was hindered by the complicated processes that local authorities have to follow to procure joint ventures between the public and private sectors, and that experts were needed within the ‘green agenda’ to liaise between the two. “It is difficult to consolidate all of the different issues presented to a local authority and be able to decide which projects take precedence,” said Shamala Evans, project manager at Coventry City Council. “There is a clear need for someone to disseminate information from multiple sectors and be able to focus on the main ways of tackling climate change. “We would like to see a massive push within the community. People need to understand the issues in order to engage with them. With a community push comes more resources allocated to environmental issues.” She said the potential for ‘people power’ within rural communities was huge but largely forgotten, and that individual communities should work together to fund energy efficient and eco-friendly projects. Shaun Gibbons, project manager of Smart Energy Systems Development
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EVENT REVIEW: UK BATTERY & ENERGY STORAGE for the Greater London Authority, said there were several projects in the pipeline, including a vehicle-to-grid charging project, E-Flex, which uses batteries as a twoway energy source using the vehicle battery and selling surplus power to the grid; Home Response, a twoyear pilot that will test Batteries ever more vital Nottingham one of four The growth potential of to meet utility challenges cities taking part in an hydrogen is huge… but energy solutions with battery storage technology — William Kirk-Wilson, EU-funded vehicle-to-grid a lack of bankable return in around 160 London National Grid trial — Michael Gallagher, on investment — Ewan homes; and FlexLondon, Nottingham City Council Murray, Atkins Global a program that identifies organizations with the potential to use, generate and store energy at various times of needs large-scale adoption before 168,000 tonnes of which will have the day or year, and match them with savings can be made, he said, but reached the end of their life by 2025, reiterating the theme of collaboration it will take a very long time for us to innovators that can help manage it. The aim, Gibbons said, was for the between industries he said the public reach a state where we are confronted projects to enable more renewable could be educated and informed about by mountains of Li-ion waste,” Melin said. energy generation in London and alternative energy projects. Murray described the HyNet North Asia would be the key, Melin said, manage demand on the grid. Another example of a successful West project, a proposed hydrogen where portable device recycling was project with local government was energy and carbon capture, usage and already a successful market, especially presented by Jerry Stokes, executive storage project spanning Liverpool, in China. “If a company wants to get into chairman of energy deployment firm Manchester and parts of Cheshire, which comprised multiple technologies the business of recycling batteries, it Gridserve. makes much more sense for them to Gridserve has completed one of and companies working together. “With public acceptance, the manufacture those batteries in the first the UK’s most advanced hybrid solar farms, the York Project, which has opportunities could be huge: more place. This is something that China bifacial solar panels with single-axis jobs, decarbonization in the shorter does very well,” he said. UK firm Connected Energy is trackers installed on a 198-acre site. term, and increased security and Warrington Borough Council paid for independence of the UK energy focusing on the second-life battery market and is already setting an the project, which with 30MWh of industry,” he said. With all the development there will example of a ‘circular economy’, lithium battery cells should be enough to power around 13,000 homes for the need to be regulation, which was managing both production and emphasized by Nicolas Good, senior consumption to extend the life cycle of next 30 years, Stokes said. Michael Gallagher, regional energy data scientist at Upside Energy. He its products. Connected Energy promoted the projects manager at Nottingham City concentrated on three areas: domestic, Council, said the authority was one of vehicle-to-grid and the decentralization second life use of batteries in the automotive and energy markets, with four cities taking part in an EU-funded of energy systems. “Despite the potential for robust plans to accelerate their adaptation for vehicle-to-grid trial. It has ordered 40 new electric vehicles with plans to use investment in all three of these areas, the energy storage systems industry. Further afield is Northvolt, a Swedish them as part of an integrated system the business case for domestic energy combining vehicles, battery storage, storage is heavily dependent on battery manufacturer which, he said, claimed to ‘conscientiously source solar PV and a smart management regulation,” he said. raw materials and maintain a minimal system. environmental footprint through While most of the day focused on Lithium battery recycling production’. Northvolt is working battery technology and innovation, issues Ewan Murray, mechanical engineer Hans Eric Melin, founder of Circular on a model for recycling lithium-ion Storage Research and batteries that will enable the elemental at engineering and design company Energy Atkins Global, said by 2050 30% of Consulting, wrapped up the day’s talks metals to be recovered and refined. “What will drive battery recycling is the UK’s energy could be coming from with a presentation on lithium battery recycling. Melin was confident that, the value held in those batteries at the hydrogen. “The growth potential of hydrogen is despite the future predicament posed end of their life,” said Melin. “In terms huge,” Murray said, although because by lithium waste, it is an issue the of companies involved in recycling, the highest bidder will get the batteries, long-term funding strategies were still industry need not worry about… yet. “Although there is an expected 40 and the highest bidder will most likely not clear there was perceived to be a lack of bankable return on investment. million tonnes of Li-ion batteries be one who will reuse those batteries Hydrogen is also a technology that expected on the market by 2030, or the components within them.”
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Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 41
FORTHCOMING EVENTS 2020 Intersolar Middle East Conference
Boston hosts Solar Power Northeast
March 3 – 5 Dubai, UAE
Solar Power Northeast February 19 – 20 Boston, Massachusetts. USA Solar Power Northeast is the largest forum in the Northeast for the solar and energy storage industries to come together and learn about the trends and legislation impacting grid resilience and reliability in the region. This event will feature multiple tracks of education that include business and market insights, technology, policy, energy storage, innovation and more – plus extensive networking opportunities. Contact SEIA & SEPA www.events.solar/northeast/
Electric Vehicles Battery Tech 2020 February 24 – 25 Los Angeles, California, USA Battery Tech 2020: where electric vehicle battery technology innovators will meet with leading automotive manufacturers to explore new battery technologies and battery management systems for use in next generation electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles. Contact IQ Hub Tel: +1 206 582 0128 www.usa.battery-technology-conference.com
Energy Storage Summit February 25 – 26 London, UK The largest UK downstream focused event addressing energy storage returns to London in February 2020. It includes four streams filled with developers, financiers, utilities, networks and aggregators discussing standalone storage, along with co-located and C&I applications. Contact Solar Media Tel: +44 207 871 0122 www.storagesummit.solarenergyevents.com
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10th International Smart Grid Expo February 26 – 28 Tokyo, Japan Japan’s largest international exhibition showcasing various cutting-edge technologies and products related to smart grid and smart communities. The best place to: • Find products and technologies to solve research and production issues • Effectively compare test technologies from around the world • Seek detailed and rapid solutions to problems • Carry out face-to-face business meeting with key industry leaders. Contact Reed Exhibitions Japan Tel: +81-3-3349-8576 www.smartgridexpo.jp/en-gb.html
Resource Recycling Expo 2020 February 26 – 28 Tokyo, Japan
The Intersolar Middle East conference focuses on photovoltaics, PV production technologies and solar thermal technologies. Since its foundation, Intersolar has become the most important industry platform for manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, service providers and partners of the global solar industry. Intersolar at Middle East Electricity is the largest gathering of solar industry professionals in the Middle East & Africa, offering the most effective trade-focused forum for international manufacturers and distributors looking to meet regional buyers. Contact Intersolar www.intersolar.ae/en/home.html
Energy Storage USA March 3 – 4 Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA Following the successful launch of Energy Storage Summit USA, Solar Media is pleased to announce its return for a 2nd year. Renowned for its quality, breadth and expertise, this event features an all-encompassing range of strategic and technical sessions on the adoption and deployment of storage. Key market drivers such as the falling price of lithium-ion batteries, investment in electric vehicle infrastructure, FERC Order 841, government incentives, grid modernization, transition from dependency on networks to a desire for autonomy and intermittent renewable sources all add to an exciting time for the energy storage value chain. Contact Solar Media Tel: +44 207 871 0122 www.storageusa.solarenergyevents.com
India Smart Utility Week March 3 – 7 New Delhi, India
A new show specializing in recycling technologies & services of renewable energy resources such as solar panels and rechargeable batteries. The 2nd Resource Recycling Expo will be held inside the world’s largest-scale smart energy show – World Smart Energy Week 2020.
ISUW 2020 will bring together India’s leading electricity, gas and water utilities, policy makers, regulators, investors and the world’s top-notch smart energy experts and researchers to discuss trends, share best practices and showcase next generation technologies and products in smart energy and smart cities domains.
Contact Reed Exhibitions Japan Tel: +81-3-3349-8576 www.recycling-expo.jp/en-gb.html
Contact India Smart Grid Forum Tel: +11 4105 7658 www.isgw.in
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS 2020 INTERBAT March 4 – 6 Moscow, Russia
For the 29th consecutive year, Russia’s battery storage association — better known as INTERBAT — has brought together Russian and international battery manufacturers and suppliers to meet in this the most prestigious specialized exhibition and trade fair. Contact International Association “INTERBAT” & National Association of Power Sources Manufacturers “RUSBAT” Tel: +7 499 248 4653 Email: interbat@interbat.ru www.interbat.ru/index-e.htm
Energy Storage Europe March 10 – 12 Düsseldorf, Germany For those who would like to get to know the entire world of energy storage, its leading technologies and key figures, there is only one destination: Energy Storage Europe in Düsseldorf. The unrivalled focus on the topic of energy storage can only be found here in Düsseldorf. The entire range of technologies in all its diversity is here: electrical, thermal, chemical and mechanical solutions.
22nd International Conference on Lithium Batteries —ICLB
Electricity Pakistan
March 12 – 13 Miami, FL. USA
Electricity Pakistan will become Pakistan’s premier exhibition for the energy, storage and power industry. It is a dedicated platform for manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, users and energy storage solutions providers. Participants from governments, utilities, independent energy producers, energy storage products manufacturers, consulting companies, associates and other related sectors are invited to discuss applications, opportunities and challenges for the energy, storage and power sector.
The ICLB 2020 aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results about all aspects of lithium batteries. It provides the premier interdisciplinary forum for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns, practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted in the field of lithium batteries. Contact WASET – World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology www.waset.org/lithium-batteries-conferencein-march-2020-in-miami#
Solar Pakistan March 19 – 21 Lahore, Pakistan SOLAR Pakistan is the only dedicated platform to bring the latest solar innovations and showcase the largest solar projects in the region, providing a unique platform in building partnerships with all government and private sectors in pursuing innovative solutions. Contact FAKT Exhibitions Tel: +92 21 3581 0637 39 www.solarfairpakistan.com
Contact Messe Düsseldorf Caroline Markowski Tel: +49 211/4560 - 7281 www.energy-storage-online.com
Annual Microgrid Global Innovation Forum March 10 – 11 Chicago, Illinois, USA
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Contact FAKT Exhibitions Tel: +92 21 3581 0637 39 www.electricitypak.com
International Advanced Battery Power March 23 – 25 Münster, Germany The conference Advanced Battery Power offers an excellent platform for companies, research institutes, universities and individuals to present their work and results in battery technology to a wide expert public. As in previous years, scientists, developers and engineers from across the entire battery value chain are again expected to attend the 12th International Symposium “Advanced Battery Power – Kraftwerk Batterie” in Münster, Germany. The most advanced first-hand and cross-industry information on all aspects of battery development and applications are both the mandate and the appeal of the Advanced Battery Power Symposium and Battery Day NRW before it. About 750 participants from all over the world, 34 exhibiting companies and almost 100 speakers on three conference days give the battery conference 2020 in Aachen a promising start to become again one of the highlights of the growing battery business worldwide. Contact Haus Der Technik Brigitte Doleschel Tel: +49 (0) 179-341-4328 Email: b.doleschel@hdt.de www.battery-power.eu/en/
The forum brings together thought leaders, utilities, energy providers, project managers and other stakeholders for focused networking and in-depth information sharing concerning the latest technological developments, design, implementation and operation of hybrid renewable energy microgrids. The emphasis is on maximizing the business case for microgrids, integration into the larger grid and sharing real-world case studies of both gridtied and off-grid/remote environments. Contact Smart Grid Observer www.microgridinnovation.com/Chicago/
March 19 – 21 Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore
Münster
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS 2020 Solar Power Mexico
Battery Tech Expo
March 24 – 26 Mexico City, Mexico
March 26 Northampton, UK
Solar Power Mexico is the first exhibition and conference specializing in the energy and solar technology segment, a business with growth rates of over 25% and an expected investment of more than $100 billion in renewable energy by 2031. The event will feature a seminar programme and exhibition at Centro Citibanamex.
The Battery industry is on the cusp of a power revolution with big technology companies investing heavily in the next generation of battery development and energy storage. The event will provide a unique opportunity to showcase the latest products, technologies and services covering the Battery Management Systems, EV Battery, Battery Storage, Battery Development/ Discovery, Commercial and Mobile Power Device sectors.
Contact SNEC & Solar Power International www.hfmexico.mx/solarpowermexico/
EV Infrastructure Summit 2020 March 25 – 26 London, UK The second edition of the EV Infrastructure Summit (25-26 March) will focus on the opportunities and challenges involved in establishing a UKwide charging infrastructure as part of the transition to zero emission vehicles. By the date of the summit, it is anticipated that OLEV will have published its proposals for high power charging, which will make the event very timely. It is also possible that the Chancellor will have delivered the Autumn Statement before the conference, which will include a budgetary allocation for the delivery of OLEV’s high power charging plan. Contact City and Financial Global Tel: +44 (0)20 3713 1631 www.cityandfinancialconferences.com/ events/ev-infrastructure-summit-2020/ event-summary-b0d3c5220b174f1b86d27e2167b24287.aspx
Contact 10fourmedia David Reeks Tel: +44 1283 815 719 Email|: david.reeks@10fourmedia.co.uk www.batterytechexpo.co.uk
2020 International Zinc Conference Europe March 30 – April 1 Istanbul, Turkey In addition to providing an update on key market trends, including supply and demand for concentrates and metal, sustainable development, first use markets with a focus on hot dip and continuous galvanizing, innovative applications and regulatory issues, this 1.5-day conference offers excellent networking opportunities. Contact International Zinc Association Tel: +1 919 361 4647 www.zinc.org/international-zinc-conferenceeurope-2020/
6th Residential Energy Storage Forum — Europe March 30 – April 2 Munich, Germany With speakers from 12 utilities, 3 commercial and industrial companies, 4 regulators and 16 countries, gain insights on operational projects from more than 12 utilities including: VATTENFALL, EDF, E.ON, GREENPEACE ENERGY, ENEL, EVOLVERE, VIESGO, WESTNETZ, WEMAG, EDP and many others. Join us for a fun-filled dinner at the Löwenbräukeller in the centre of Munich. Get to know your peers outside of work and enjoy the impressive architecture of this historical building with a long tradition offering modern Bavarian cuisine, and of course some of the best beer in town!
London hosts the EV Infrastructure Summit 2020 in March
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Contact Dufresne Davide Bonomi Tel: +44 203 289 0312 davide@energystorageforum.com www.energystorageforum.com/residentialforum-program
Lisbon: Large Scale Solar Europe
Large Scale Solar Europe March 31 – April 1 Lisbon, Portugal As Europe and the UK continue to see a growing number of new solar developments, this summit will look at topics including tenders, equipment, energy pricing, finance and the grid. Contact Solar Media Tel: +44 207 871 0122 www.lss.solarenergyevents.com
The Solar Show Africa, featuring The Energy Storage Show March 31 – April 1 Johannesburg, Africa For 23 years, delegates have flocked to the conference to gain first-hand knowledge on upcoming projects, investment opportunities and innovations across the continent that will help utilities deliver energy. The conference brings together the brightest and most innovative minds that are shaping the way we generate energy and meet growing demand across Africa. Contact Terrapinn www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/solar-showafrica/index.st
30th Annual Energy Storage Association Conference & Expo April 8 – 10 Phoenix, Arizona. USA The 30th Annual Conference and Expo is the industry’s premiere conference and networking event. It is the most influential gathering of market leaders, customers, decision makers, and technology innovators. Attending will provide you with new strategies, new connections and innovative ideas that will move your organization forward. Contact Energy Storage Association Tel: +1 202 293-0537 www.esacon.energystorage-events.org
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS 2020 Solar and Energy Storage Southeast
CMT’s E-mobility Conference Asia
Battcon
April 20 – 21 Atlanta, Georgia, USA
April 23 – 24 Bangkok, Thailand
Solar and Energy Storage Southeast brings together those that are doing business in the region, or would like to conduct more business in the region to discuss strategies, market trends in the southeast, policy updates that impact businesses, and numerous networking opportunities to make more connections.
The 2nd CMT E-mobility Conference provides a platform to promote your organization to influential players and investors in the industry.
May 5 – 8 Hollywood, Florida, USA
Contact Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) www.events.solar/southeast/
2nd South Korea Renewable Energy Summit 2020 April 21 – 22 Seoul, South Korea To push forward the renewable energy development in South Korea and facilitate collaboration between local and international parties, Neoventure Corporation is planning the 2nd RE series event in South Korea – 2nd South Korea Renewable Energy Summit 2020 co-located with Solar + ESS and Offshore Wind. The expo will combine a large exhibition, conference and project matchmaking forum, creating a one-stop business matching platform for all industry players to share their knowledge and to expand business contacts in South Korea’s rapidly growing renewable energy sector. Contact Neo Venture Corp Tel: +86 21 6432 6270 www.neoventurecorp.com/south-korearenewable-energy-summit-2020/
PV India Tech April 21 – 22 New Delhi, India Welcome to PV IndiaTech 2020, the latest addition to PV-Tech’s acclaimed series of bespoke, high quality, global solar PV events. The conference will continue to bring together all key domestic and overseas stakeholders, including government bodies, investors, and the leading companies today from manufacturing to O&M and asset management. To thrive globally as a major PV power beyond 2020, India has to succeed in unlocking its potential both to manufacture and to lay claim to quality utility-scale solar farms that are providing high returns on investment to site owners. Contact Solar Media Tel: +44 207 871 0122 www.indiatech.solarenergyevents.com
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Contact Centre for Management Technology — CMT. Tel: +65 6346 9138 www.cmtevents.com/aboutevent
Energy Storage Latin America April 28 – 29 Bogotá, Colombia The Energy Storage Summit Latin America is the first event of its kind, designed with a clear goal to accelerate both dialogue and deployment of energy storage solutions. Contact Solar Media Tel: +44 207 871 0122 www.storagelatam.solarenergyevents.com
2020 SEPA Utility Conference May 4 – 6 Charlotte, North Carolina, USA Utilities teaching utilities how to implement clean energy and grid modernization technology – that’s what Utility Conference is all about. In 2019 attendees had opportunities to connect and learn with other utilities from across the nation during 54+ hours of networking and education. Sessions and events ranged from EVs to DERS and from storage as a utility asset to low-income solar. If there has been an incredible utility innovation somewhere in the country, you’ll learn about it at Utility Conference. Whether your utility is tackling electrified transportation, grid resilience, DER integration, regulatory innovation or new utility business models, the Utility Conference will give you the tools you need to be the hero for your utility and your customers. Contact Smart Electric Power Alliance Tel: +1 202 857 0898 www.sepapower.org/event-complex/2020utility-conference/
Battcon is an educational program where users, engineers and manufacturers stay up to date by learning of the latest industry trends and how to apply best practices to the manufacturing, safety, selection, installation and use of stationary batteries. The core conference provides an intense learning experience unavailable from any other industry source. Presentations include cutting-edge topics delivered by leading authorities. Open discussion panels and breakout workshops geared to the utility, datacentre and telecom segments are also included in the conference. Datacentre, telecom or utility industry professionals who are working in mission critical facilities or are involved in the development of stationary batteries and related equipment will find the Battcon experience is second to none.. Contact Battcon Email: events@battcon.com www.battcon.com
Delhi hosts PV India Tech in April
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS 2020 CTI Symposia USA May 11 – 14 Novi, MI. USA Every year, the international transmission and drive community meets up at the International CTI SYMPOSIA – automotive drivetrains, intelligent, electrified – in Germany, China and USA to discuss the best strategies and technologies for tomorrow’s car, buses and trucks. From efficiency, comfort or costs to electrification, energy storage and connectivity, these premier industry meetings cover all the key issues in depth. Join us at the CTI SYMPOSIUM USA. The place to get updated on latest technical developments and applications on automotive transmissions for conventional and alternative drives. Contact CTI – Car Training Institute Tel: +49 211 88743 3333 Email: info@car-training-institute.com www.car-training-institute.com
All Energy May 13 – 14 Glasgow, UK All-Energy’s mission is to enable the UK renewable energy community to interact, conduct business, network and learn, whether face to face or online. Every year in Scotland, All-Energy connects 300+ energy suppliers, developers, investors, technology developers and policy makers with 7,000+ energy industry buyers. With more than 75,000 unique web users, 4000 e-newsletter subscribers a month and 12,400 social media followers, All-Energy also delivers a multichannel platform for the industry with access to expert presentations, webinars, reports, interviews and blogs. All-Energy is the UK’s leading renewable energy and low carbon innovation event, showcasing the latest technologies and services for the energy supply chain and both private and public sector energy end users. All-Energy generates invaluable connections between the buyers and sellers of low carbon solutions across the UK marketplace. Contact Reed Exhibitions Tel: +208 271 2179 www.all-energy.co.uk
Glasgow
46 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020
IDTechEx Show! May 13 – 15 Berlin, Germany The IDTechEx Show! presents the latest emerging technologies at one event, with eight concurrent technologies and a single exhibition covering 3D Printing, Electric Vehicles, Energy Storage, Graphene, Internet of Things, Printed Electronics, Sensors & Wearable Technology. Due to the strong overlap across these topics, attendees and exhibitors are exposed to the full relevant supply chains and customer and supplier bases, saving you time and money from attending separate events. The IDTechEx Show! Is devised by analysts covering these topics - bringing together the most significant developments in each of these areas. Discover our matchmaking platform - connect with attendees and organise meetings in advance of the event. Contact IDTechEX Mary Ellen Guerrlich Tel: +1 617 314 6126 Email: m.guerrlich@IDTechEx.com www.idtechex.com/europe2020/show/ en/
Solar and Energy Storage Texas June 4 – 5 Houston, Texas Since its debut in San Antonio, Texas in 2016, the event has garnered the attention of industry leaders and professionals from all cross-sections of the energy industry. Each year, the event has grown and now welcomes more than 400 attendees and 40 exhibitors and continues to evolve to include the energy storage industry. Venture to the region’s premier event to expand your business, connect with industry leaders, and gain the latest trends and policies impacting the Texas market. Contact Solar Power Events Email: customerservice@sets.solar www.events.solar/texas/
Advanced Automotive Battery Conference USA June 8 – 11 San Francisco, California, USA Join a global audience of battery technologists from leading automotive OEMs and their key suppliers for a must-attend week exploring development trends and breakthrough technologies. Contact Cambridge Enertech Tel: +1 781 972 5400 www.advancedautobat.com/us/
49th Power Sources Conference June 15 – 18 Jacksonville, Florida, USA The Power Sources Conference is the oldest continually held biennial conference devoted to research and development of power source, energy conversion, power distribution and management technologies for military use. The conference goal is to bring government, industry and academic researchers and developers together to discuss advances in power and energy technologies to support the growing power demands of military platforms and electronic systems. Attendees are comprised of representatives from organizations within DoD and other government agencies who are responsible for the design, research, development, engineering and transition of power and energy components and systems, along with industry and academic partners supporting collaborative research and manufacturing of such products. Contact Samantha Tola Tel: +1 212 460 8090 ext. 203 stola@pcm411.com www.powersourcesconference.com
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS 2020 ees Europe
Tokyo hosts E-Mobility & Circular Economy EMCE 2020 from June 29-July 1
June 17 – 19 Munich, Germany
Discover future-ready solutions for renewable energy storage and advanced battery technology at ees Europe! Europe’s largest, most international and most visited exhibition for batteries and energy storage systems is the industry hotspot for suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and users of stationary electrical energy storage solutions as well as battery systems. The exhibition will be accompanied by a two-day energy storage conference where leading experts delve into current questions of this industry. Contact Solar Promotion www.ees-europe.com/en/home
7th Residential Energy Storage Forum —Australia June 22 – 25 Sydney, Australia Listen to unbiased perspectives on 36 brand new topics presented by end users. Gain invaluable insights from 14 utilities/DSOs and 2 regulators with topics such as: • Determining The Best Way To ValueStack Different Revenue Streams Of Residential Energy Storage To Increase Adoption • Developing Clear Price Structures, Network Access And Connection Agreements To Improve The Efficiency Of Residential Energy Storage Systems • Balancing Renewable Generation Variability To Maximise Value By Integrating Residential Energy Storage Systems Into A Virtual Power Plant Contact Dufresne Davide Bonomi Tel: +44 203 289 0312 davide@energystorageforum.com www.energystorageforum.com/residentialenergy-storage-australia
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E-Mobility & Circular Economy EMCE 2020 June 29 – July 1 Tokyo, Japan At EMCE 2020, the industry will present its latest services, technologies and future designs in the fields of E-Mobility, Power Distribution and Energy Storage. Meet all the industry’s stakeholders in a spacious Exhibition parallel to the Conference and experience Demo Rides with participants and media on Tokyo’s roads. Display your products and services. Show the hottest innovations in E-Mobility: cars, trucks, bikes, drones, toys, planes, helicopters, power storage and distribution. If you seek great opportunities to promote your products and services, the E-Mobility & Circular Economy is the ideal event for you! Contact ICM AG Susann Schmid Tel: +41 62 785 10 00 www.icm.ch/emce-2020
International Flow Battery Forum June 30 – July 2 Düsseldorf, Germany The meeting is aimed at all those interested in the deployment, commercialisation, demonstration, manufacturing, financing, component and material supply, and academic and industrial research of flow batteries. The IFBF has a unique combination of keynote addresses, oral and poster presentations, seminars, and panel discussions to inform and educate delegates of the benefits of flow battery systems and for all to learn and share in the development of this exciting technology.
The programme will cover recent progress, scientific, engineering and manufacturing issues, study of financial, marketing and commercial issues and will be relevant to renewable generation developers, smart grid operators, and all companies and businesses active in electricity supply. . Contact Swanbarton Tel: +44 1666 840 948 Email: info@flowbateryforum.com www.flowbatteryforum.com
PlugVolt’s July 2020 Battery Seminar July 21 – 23 Plymouth, Michigan, USA PlugVolt will be hosting its next Battery Seminar in Plymouth, MI (USA) featuring an entire day of in-depth technical tutorials on fundamental materials’ challenges for electrochemical energy storage, opportunities and challenges with solid-state batteries, best design practices for cell engineering, battery modelling and health monitoring, second life design considerations for energy storage, etc. The next two days will include complementary industry updates provided by subject matter experts from automotive and grid storage OEMs, major battery manufacturers and global Tier 1 system developers and suppliers. Attendees will also get an exclusive opportunity to tour A123 Systems’ new Novi, Michigan facility first-hand and ask questions to resident experts, and enjoy some light appetizers and beverages while networking with industry peers. Contact PlugVolt JC Soman Tel: +1 877 7584 8658
Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020 • 47
FORTHCOMING EVENTS 2020 ees South America August 25 – 27 São Paulo, Brazil
Record numbers are again expected for ees South America in Brazil ...
The special exhibition “ees South America” is the industry hotspot for suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and users of stationary and mobile electrical energy storage solutions. It will be hosted for the second time at Intersolar South America, taking place at the Expo Center Norte in São Paulo. Covering the entire value chain of innovative battery and energy storage technologies – from components and production to specific user application - it is the ideal platform for all stakeholders in the rapidly growing energy storage market. The focus at ees is on energy storage solutions suited to energy systems with increasing amounts of renewable energy sources attracting investors, utilities, installers, manufacturers and project developers from all over the world.. Contact Solar Promotion International Tel: +49 7231 58598-0 Email: info@solarpromotion.com www.intersolar.net.br/en/home/forvisitors/about-intersolar/focus-ees-southamerica.html
Shanghai hosts the 12th Shanghai International Lithium Battery Industry Fair
12th Shanghai International Lithium Battery Industry Fair August 26 – 28 Shanghai, China 12th Shanghai International Lithium Battery Industry Fair will be held on Shanghai New International Expo Centre, China. Exhibitions of new energy vehicles, super capacitors, charging equipment and energy storage will be held at the same time. The show area is expected to cover 30,000 square meters, while more than 600 exhibitors from the whole industry chain will show their latest products and technology. More than 100 visitor groups and 35,000 people will visit the site to purchase or communicate, promoting industrial innovation and development. Contact Guangzhou Zhenwei International Exhibition Tel: +86 208 395 3211 Email: cnibf@zhenweiexpo.com www.cnibf.net/en/ Email: juratesoman@plugvolt.com www.batteryseminars.com
Intersolar Mexico September 8 – 10 Mexico City, Mexico. USA
... and back to South America for Intersolar Mexico in September
48 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2020
Intersolar Mexico serves as the industry’s go-to source for invaluable technology trends and premier B2B contacts in the promising Mexican solar market.
Intersolar Mexico sits at the crosssection of photovoltaics, solar heating & cooling technologies and energy storage. The event will be the largest gathering of professionals in Mexico for international manufacturers and distributors looking to meet regional buyers in the fields of solar, renewable energy and cleantech. Contact Solar Promotion International www.intersolar.mx/en/home.html
Solar & Storage Live September 15 – 17 Birmingham, UK Solar & Storage Live’s exhibition is free to attend for all three days. The exhibition brings together stakeholders in solar generation and maintenance, storage deployment and emerging ancillary technologies: • Network with 4,500 industry professionals over three days • Visit one of our many exhibitors and check out the latest products and news • Benefit from 3 days of free content in the Solar & Storage Theatre Contact Terrapinn Helena Da Costa Tel: +44 0207 092 1093 Helena.daCosta@terrapinn.com www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/solar-storagelive/
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