The momentum behind energy storage
Janice Lin of Strategen and CESA is the co-founder of Strategen Consulting, which helped to launch Energy Storage North America. pv magazine caught up with Lin ahead of the show to get her take on this rapidly growing industry, and what ESNA has to offer.
“For this type of event, California is the place to be”
Tom Mitchell is the President of Messe Düsseldorf North America. Here, he talks about coming together with Strategen, and putting on an event that brings together players from all over the world, from up and down the energy storage value chain.
Planning for an uncertain future
Utility plans for battery storage lag well behind projections of the economic potential of storage. Yet utilities are taking on the planning challenge, which is marked by wide disagreement over the future cost of storage, the complexity of valuing storage, and the limitations of traditional planning models.
From net metering to storage in Hawaii
The picture to the right, taken at Kahe Point in West Oahu, Hawaii, offers a stark contrast. On the grounds of the Kahe power plant of the Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) the facility’s parking lot displays shiny new hybrid electric vehicles parked next to EV charging stations. This is the future of transportation in this most populated island of Hawaii, as well as Hawaii’s other islands, and for that matter in the U.S. as a whole. But looming in the backdrop is one of HECO’s oldest power plants in Hawaii, an oil-fired 650 MW beast built way back in 1963. In this very scenic part of Oahu just a walk away from the Pacific coast and a string of newly built luxury hotels, the Kahe power plant seems a very dirty relic of the past.
Between the lines
Earlier this year, The Nissan Motor Company began European delivery of its extended-range electric van, the e-NV200. The updated vehicle’s larger, 40 kWh battery will bring its range up to 200 km, making the all-electric van attractive for urban delivery fleets. But the feature that has technologists excited is not to be found in a simple upsizing of the battery pack. Rather, it’s the built-in V2G (vehicle-to-grid) charging capability that offers a long dreamed-of solution in energy storage, achieving bi-directional energy flows between fleets of EVs and the powergrid.
AI for energy storage
Athena, a battery services software package developed by Stem – is able to think fast enough, and wide enough, to coordinate distributed batteries with the near instant changing demand requirements of the power grid. The tool’s greatest strength is that it creates a “many winner” situation for businesses, utilities and Stem.
Dynapower doubles down on DC
Utility-scale developers see energy storage as the Swiss army knife of the grid: a single asset able to perform many functions. As economics improve, and the penetration of renewables increases, they have moved from asking if they need storage, to asking which functions should be prioritized. And the answer to that question shapes the topology.
Product Highlights
LG targets a bigger slice of the energy pie Home energy storage has a new entrant: LG Electronics USA’s LG Solar division. Revealed at Solar Power International in September, LG announced two mid-sized residential offerings: a 5 kW AC-coupled system which is designed as an add-on to existing solar but could also be used with […]
Refreshing blend or toxic technology cocktail?
Battery storage is racing even faster than the PV market did a few years ago. Costs are plummeting, and new production lines are popping up all around the world. Smart people with smart ideas are leveraging venture capital and research funds. M&A activity is also accelerating with a new range of investors taking interest. But the technology battle is far from over, says Ragna Haupt-Schmidt, Partner at Energy Consultancy Everoze.
Lithium-ion versus flow batteries, versus the future
As the energy storage industry begins to see meaningful growth in markets around the world, all eyes are on lithium-ion technology. But developers and utilities are investigating other battery concepts. Flow batteries are seen by some as having particularly strong advantages over lithium-ion, and several large-scale batteries are already being built using this technology.
