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Wind/Solar forced to buy Storage?

By on April 13, 2011 in Blog

At the second annual cleantech conference at Hastings College of the Law (a U.C. school), Alex Morris, who runs advanced technology planning at Southern California Edison, told the crowd to study the implications of a recent decision by FERC. Under the new regulation, companies that put power-producing assets on the grid that exacerbate intermittent power delivery will be required to pay for the costs associated with ameliorating the situation.

In other words, if you have a solar or wind farm, you will have to buy storage systems to smooth out power production or invest in some other grid balancing technology. Existing wind and solar farms are grandfathered in, so you won’t have to retrofit them. We’re trying to get more on this, but thought for now it was interesting to note. It was the issue that brought the most questions from the audience at the event.

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SunPower Working on Solar Plus Energy Storage

By on September 27, 2010 in Blog

SunPower is looking to combine rooftop solar with batteries, flow batteries and thermal storage technology.

SunPower Working on Solar Plus Energy StorageArmed with a $1.8 million grant from the CPUC, SunPower is looking to demonstrate the integration of energy storage systems with existing PV systems for commercial customers.  SunPower is partnering with Ice Energy, Xtreme Power and ZBB Energy (NYSE Amex: ZBB), and working with an unnamed major retailer to demonstrate the benefits of combining PV with energy storage.

The “unnamed major retailer” is, in fact, named in the CPUC release — it’s Target Stores.  The program will be implemented by SunPower in conjunction with PG&E, KEMA, Sandia National Laboratories and Target.

The CPUC grant is part of the California Solar Initiative (CSI) RD&D program (‘RD&D,’ oddly, stands for Research, Development, Deployment and Demonstration.)  The CSI aims to create 1,940 megawatts of new, solar-produced electricity by 2016 with a budget of $2.2 billion over 10 years.

I spoke with Greg Tropsa, EVP and co-founder of Ice Energy, who said, “These technologies have the potential to be more valuable together than any single one of them alone, and that’s what this project sets out to demonstrate.”  The project will demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of combined solar-storage integration on commercial buildings for peak demand reduction.

“As the sun begins to set in the afternoon, the Ice Bear units will deliver stored energy to bridge the gap between increasing building electrical demand and decreasing solar energy production,” Tropsa explained. “The project will demonstrate that the combination of solar and ice storage will significantly reduce a building’s peak demand charge, saving money for the consumer and helping the environment by reducing the need for utilities to dispatch fossil fuel-fired peaking generators. The bonus is the Ice Bear storage units are recharged during the off-peak hours, absorbing wind and surplus low-cost baseload generation.”

Tropsa said, “The commercial properties are very repeatable in their load shape. The box retailers are incredibly predictable.  Whether it be fans, motors, cash registers or people — the load shapes are very repeatable,” adding, “The one space that’s not repeatable is residential.”

I spoke with Julie Bluden at SunPower about the grant.  She expressed SunPower’s corporate interest in understanding, “What are the consequences of adding storage to a rooftop?”

It’s not SunPower’s first look at combining solar power and energy storage.  “We have worked on the Lanai 1.5 megawatt battery storage project,” said Blunden.  She added, “This is the perfect experiment to assess different types of storage.”  Ice Energy uses ice as storage, ZBB is a flow battery, and Xtreme Power is a battery system.

“This is an important step in understanding the economic effects of storage, and an extremely useful step for understanding the commercial and industrial customer’s storage requirements.”

Blunden spoke about energy storage and variable generation resources.  With “the low levels of [solar and wind] penetration in the western grid, ancillary services will continue to manage variable generation,” said Blunden, citing an LBNL report on the ability of robust grid networks to withstand variable generation.

Blunden pointed out that photovoltaics and variable generation can reach enormous penetration levels and exist on a grid without storage.  She cited the 7 gigawatts of variable resources on a 70-gigawatt system in Germany and 3 gigawatts of renewables on a sunny day in Spain. She said, “We have the data — it’s just in the EU.”

NEA-funded Solar Storage is a startup, still in stealth, with some interest in this area, as well.

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Solar and Storage

By on September 27, 2010 in Blog

Can the electric grid handle the growing flow of wind and solar that will come online in the next few years? According toa report out Friday from the California Independent System Operator (Cal ISO), which runs the state’s grid, the answer is yes. . . with a few caveats. In particular Cal ISO needs to help shape policies around the integration of energy storage.

California’s renewable portfolio standard, which says that 20 percent of a utility’s electricity needs have to come from renewables by 2010, will lead to a cumulative capacity of 2,246 megawatts for solar and 6,688 megawatts for wind in the state by 2012 (the 2010 deadline comes with a grace period for utilities). But Cal ISO expects that with the addition of all that solar and wind, conventional, natural-gas power plants will be turned on and off more often, by 35 percent, to make up for any excess or shortfall of power from the variable nature of wind and solar.

Cal ISO found that there are a variety of things it needs to do to make sure the addition of wind and solar to the grid goes smoothly, including pursuing incentives and rules to attract and curtail the amount of renewable energy being fed to the grid, and turning to more cutting-edge weather forecasting tools to estimate in advance the likely output from wind and solar farms.

But one of the most important moves over the long run will be to make sure that policies around energy storage will enable the economical integration of novel storage technologies on the grid. The report doesn’t go into details about this missing piece, but the fact is the Cal ISO has already been lobbying the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on how to classify new storage technologies that could help grid operators manage the supply and demand of the grid. Cal ISO wants FERC to treat most storage systems as a form of energy generation rather than transmission, a distinction that affects how storage system owners get paid and, by extension, which emerging technologies could find warmer reception in the near term.

Cal ISO contends that storage can safe-keep the power for long hours but also inject it into the grid at a short notice, so it should be considered a generation asset that gets wholesale market prices, said Gregg Fishman, a spokesman for CalISO. If it’s counted as a transmission asset, then its owner can get a guaranteed recovery of the investment from rate payers.

Cal ISO already treats pumped hydro, a conventional technology, as generation, Fishman said. A pumped hydro operation uses excess electricity to move water uphill to a reservoir and let it run downstream to turbine generators when electricity rates are higher.

Similar discussions about how to regulate storage are happening throughout other parts of the country. New York ISO, for example, has gotten approval from FERC to set rules that say electricity from batteries and fly wheels can fetch market prices set specifically for power that is used to balance the grid. Beacon Power has gotten a federal loan guarantee for $43 million to build a 20-megawatt flywheel energy storage operation in New York.AES Energy has snagged $17.1 million in federal loan guarantees to build a 20-megawatt storage plant in New York using A123Systems’ lithium-ion batteries.

While regulators figure out how to marry storage technologies with the grid, companies such as SunPower and SolarCity are looking at packaging storage systems with solar electric systems for businesses and homes. Both have gotten grants from California to figure out the costs and benefits of adding storage.

SunPower has gotten nearly $1.86 million to see how batteries and ice energy can be a good fit for solar energy systems it sells to commercial customers, who have to deal with a more complex rate structure. “For net metering, residential rates tend to be simpler than commercial rates,” said Julie Blunden, executive vice president of public policy and corporate communications. “You might arrange your solar and storage to maximize of your net metering.”

SolarCity, meanwhile, is looking into the possibly of adding storage to its offering in the future. The installer has gotten $1.77 million from California to see if lithium-ion batteries are a good fit for residential solar electric systems and teamed up with with Tesla Motors, which will provide the batteries for six, yet disclosed, test sites.

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