Solar Energy Storage Slow But Can Ramp Up

An energy storage-system research project at the University of Arizona Science and Technology Park has been slow to get going but things will be ramped up soon with the installation of a revamped compressed-air storage system and new battery systems in the next couple of months.

Tucson-based photovoltaics maker Solon Corp. is teaming up with Tucson Electric Power Co. and the University of Arizona’s Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy (AzRISE) to build an energy storage research site at the UA Science and Technology Park.

The Energy Storage Management Research and Testing site will be hooked up to a 1.6-megawatt solar plant, built by Solon for owner TEP at the UA Tech Park’s Solar Zone, near South Kolb Road and Interstate 10.

The first phase of the project was to begin in August, but was put on hold because an initial design for an air-operated turbine supplied by a Canadian company didn’t pass muster.

AzRISE expects the compressed-air systems to be ready for installation sometime in January. AzRISE also is in talks with battery makers to provide additional storage technologies for study.

Those technologies include “flow batteries,” which store electrolytic fluids in external tanks, as well as advanced lithium-ion batteries of various chemistries.

Tucson-based Solon, the U.S. arm of Berlin-based Solon SE, picked Saft because the companies had worked together in Europe and Saft has significant manufacturing capabilities, said Bill Richardson, Solon’s director of research and development.

[Read More From Source: Azstarnet]

Flow Battery Company Raises 900,000 Euros

Red-T, a Dublin-based flow battery technology company has raised €900,000 in funding led by AIB Seed Capital Fund, Dublin BIC, Enterprise Ireland and its CEO.

RED-T’s technology is a Vanadium-based flow battery which enables the cheap and efficient storage of electrical energy in liquid form. The technology has a variety of applications, including mobile masts, electric vehicles and renewable energy power stations.

This technology represents a paradigm shift in energy storage, and ultimately, the complete displacement of conventional fossil fuel power with renewable generation. The system has unlimited life, with a long cycle life between component replacement (about 10,000 full cycles).

This enables the sustainable storage of energy, and for the first time ever, provides the ability for an energy user to completely shift to renewable power sources. Red-T is targeting a market valued at US$6.8bn.

[Read More From Source: Silicon Republic]

South Korean Smart Grid and Energy Storage

ZBB Energy Corp. and its South Korean partner have shipped the joint venture’s first energy storage and power control system to Jeju Island in South Korea, the proving ground for a national smart-grid initiative in that country.

The system from ZBB and Honam Petrochemical will be used in testing the distribution of electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels. Jeju Island has been selected as a test bed for a national “smart grid” project that aims to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy security for the country.

Honam and ZBB had entered a development agreement earlier this year which Honam will pay ZBB a total of $3 million and gain rights to sell the batteries in parts of Asia, including exclusive rights to manufacture and sell the battery within South Korea.

ZBB partnered with Honam Petrochemical to completely re-engineer our zinc-bromide flow battery and develop the most advanced and cost effective energy storage device available on a global scale.

By leveraging its technology leadership in the IT and communications space, Korea aims to form an advanced smart grid structure.

[Read More From Source: JSOnline]

New Electrode May Foster Grid Batteries

Researchers at Stanford University are addressing the renewal storage issue and have reported the development of a new high-power electrode that is cheap, durable and efficient. This discovery might potentially foster the manufacture of batteries large enough to provide for economical renewable energy storage on the grid.

Laboratory tests show this electrode, which was made using crystalline nanoparticles from a copper compound, copper hexacyanoferrate survived 40,000 charging/discharging cycles. Following that activity, the electrode could still be charged to 80 percent of original capacity. By comparison, today’s average lithium-ion battery can only handle approximately 400 charge/discharge cycles before deteriorating.

“At a rate of several cycles per day, this electrode would have a good 30 years of useful life on the electrical grid,” said Colin Wessells, lead author of the study and a graduate student in materials science and engineering.

The Stanford team’s paper describing their research was published this week in the journal Nature Communications.

[Read More From Source: Cleantechnica]

£9.7 million Smart Grid Project for Cambridgeshire, UK

A 700 km2 smart grid project is planned for Cambridgeshire, UK, by UK Power Networks where the £9.7 million Flexible Plug and Play (FFP) Low Carbon Networks project will connect and manage onshore wind power using smart grid solutions run over an IPv6-based communications network.

The smart grid project aims to trial technical and commercial solutions and develop an investment modelling tool, that can serve as a blue print for smart grid projects elsewhere.

According to Patrick Ravazet, Director of Utilities and Smart Grid for Cable&Wireless Worldwide, “The renewable energy targets set by government are leading significant changes in the sources of eneryg generation, and how intermittent sources of generation are brought on stream and effectively managed. IP-based communications networks can overlay the existing grid reducing the structural burden of deploying the key information they need to effectively manage the distribution system.”

[Read More From Source: RenewableEnergyFocus]

$7M Awarded by US DOE to Hydrogen Storage Projects

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded more than $7 million to fund four hydrogen storage projects in California, Washington and Oregon. The hydrogen storage technologies are being developed for use in fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV). The projects aim to lower the cost and increase the performance of compressed hydrogen storage systems through the development of innovative materials and advanced tanks for efficient and safe transportation.

The selected organisations are Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Richland, Washington), HRL Laboratories, LLC (Malibu, California), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, California) and University of Oregon (Eugene, Oregon).

[Read More From Source: FuelCellToday]

Power Cube – External Energy Storage System

Axion Power International, the developer of advanced lead­carbon PbC® batteries and energy storage systems, announced that its PowerCube™ battery energy storaAxionge and battery system is being integrated as a power resource for the PJM Regulation Market, which serves 58 million people in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia. The use of PowerCube on the PJM market marks the first time an external energy storage system has been integrated into a major power grid.

Axion Power, working in partnership with Philadelphia-based Viridity Energy will initially participate in the PJM market as a 100 kw resource that will soon be ramped to higher kw levels.

According to the CEO of Axion Power, Thomas Granville, the PowerCube, is the first of its kind smaller online storage device that will be ramped up to higher kw levels. Moving forward, the technology can be configured in building blocks of 1 MW of power for 30 minutes, for PJM applications. It can also provide power quality, back-up power, power smoothing and load leveling in addition to the initial demand response we provided today. It is a great way to demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of the PowerCube and it will be used for wind and solar storage as well as for our oil rig back up power application.

A recent ruling by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) reduced the minimum participation requirement from 500 kw to 100 kw and increased the compensation paid to regulation resources, paving the way for the use of the PowerCube on the PJM project.

[Read more from source: SACBEE]

Flywheels Business Case Post Beacon Power

Beacon Power’s flywheels could provide 20 megawatts-worth of such frequency regulation as well as short-term energy storage for the state grid. The only problem is that Beacon’s owner went bankrupt in the process of putting the “alternating” into alternating current—after taking a loan for $39.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. The good news is the business is enough to potentially pay back the American taxpayers but not enough to keep Beacon in business.

The flywheels represent a growing trend in electricity grids worldwide—storage. Sodium sulfur batteries have been used to store electricity from Japan’s grid since 2002 and to back up Xcel Energy’s wind farms in Minnesota since 2008. Molten salts help a power plant in Sicily store the sun’s heat to turn into electricity at night and on cloudy days. Even water pumped uphill at various sites across the U.S. and air compressed into an underground cavern in Alabama, among other places, store electrical energy when it is cheap and give it back when it is expensive. Such storage is considered vital to help intermittent renewable resources, such as the wind and sun, play a bigger role in U.S.—and global—energy supply.

Beacon’s flywheels maybe simply too expensive to compete with the other technologies on offer. “Flywheels don’t typically hold as much energy as batteries, commented by Haresh Kamath, strategic program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute’s Technology Innovation Program—an industry-funded research group. “But they last a very long time and that makes them attractive in some applications, especially where the system is cycled very often—that is, where it is discharged and charged repeatedly across a short time period.”

A new analysis published November 17 in Science by Kamath and colleagues found that batteries are rapidly becoming cheaper and allow for storing electricity generated when it is not in demand. Such storage would greatly extend the potential use of renewables for power but also reduce the necessary investment in the grid itself. In the past, building a new power plant and lay more cable to connect it to the grid than to install a large battery system is cheaper but not now. It is more expensive to build new transmission lines and other grid hardware, making battery storage potentially more attractive. According to research, cost is the given reason that energy storage is not widely used on the grid.

[Read more from source: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN]

“Smart Grid” Project at Maui and the Valley Isle

Turning the sun or wind into reliable power for homes and businesses isn’t as simple as hooking up a PV panel or a windmill. Doing any of it on a mass scale requires the existing power grid to be able to handle it first.

The so-called “smart grid” technology comes in to measure and manage loads and avoid major overhauls systemwide. Hawaii has several demonstration projects in the works — one big one on maui and now another significant one is a $37 million investment by the “new Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization — a branch of Japan’s ministry of economy, trade and industry.

With the reconsideration of nuclear energy role play in the Japanese energy picture, the advancing of alternative energy technology is even more crucial than it was before. By late next year project contractors including Hitachi will install meters in about 200 residential, commercial and electric vehicle charging locations in the Kihei area.

[Read more from source: KHON2]

Battery Energy Storage Boosts Power in Smart Grid

The ever-increasing political and environmental pressure for the power generation industry to meet demanding climate and energy targets is driving the increased use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. As a result, electricity generation is becoming more decentralized and more intermittent. This calls for new types of power grids with both the flexibility and intelligence to receive generation of all qualities and quantities from diverse sources, and the capability of managing them to deliver reliable consumer supplies.

A specific area where energy storage is set to make an early impact on smarter grids is in helping to boost self-consumption in grid-connected solar PV (photovoltaic) installations.

PV installations with a permanent connection to the electricity grid are categorized as “on-grid” applications. This is currently the most popular type of PV system for homes and businesses in the developed world, comprising more than 90% of all PV installations. In the near future, it is expected that we will see a significant change in this operating model as households aim to become energy autonomous. This means that they will both produce and consume their own electricity, using a local energy storage system to store any excess PV energy until it is needed. In essence, the PV energy produced will need to be ‘time-shifted’ from the daytime, peaking at noon, to make it available on demand in the evening. Converting daytime solar power into a usable form during non-daylight hours requires an energy storage system.

In grid-connected energy storage applications, the newest practical battery technology, lithium-ion (Li-ion), offers the potential for significant improvements in terms of performance and service life over conventional storage batteries, and it is also zero-maintenance. Although Li-ion batteries are very well established in consumer applications, the ordinary consumer cells are not suitable due to the more rigorous demands of PV applications. Instead, a new generation of Li-ion battery systems designed specifically for industrial applications is under development, with the first systems already on field test.

There is a clear demand across the globe for renewable energy sources, which requires a new type of grid. Energy storage is a vital element in creating the smart grid of the future with the flexibility and intelligence to receive generation from various sources with reliable delivery. Distributed on-grid PV systems with battery energy storage can effectively ‘time-shift’ production, making electrical power available when it is needed. Li-ion offers a promising energy storage technology and successful trials are leading us closer to the reality of fully producing and consuming our own household electricity. ■

[Read more from source: EP]