energy storage

In Tesla’s Q3 2017 earnings report, they gave an update on their ‘Tesla Energy’ division. They highlighted being on track to meet the 100-day deployment deadline of the 100MW/129MWh energy storage project for South Australia. Mention was made of the work being done in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria – ‘solar panels, Powerpacks and hundreds of PowerWalls.’

Additionally, Tesla – at multiple points – pointed toward a future of more revenue from energy generation and storage. 11% of the quarter’s revenue came from the Tesla Energy division.

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Electrical grid complexity has increased immensely. Recently, weather damage and intermittent renewable energy production have increased the dynamics that must be managed in a large power grid. In order to address that, the Dutch company Alfen is currently field testing their new ‘cellular smart grid’ solution in Lelystad, the Netherlands.

They have developed a combination of energy storage and finely tuned algorithms to help make electrical grids more resilient and to reduce their downtime.

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Four Swiss universities came together to build the US Department of Energy’s 2017 Solar Decathlon overall winner. Eleven teams competed over the course of two years to build a home taking into account modern global demands of “reliability, resilience, and security.”

The Swiss schools – École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, School of Engineering and Architecture Fribourg, Geneva University of Art and Design, and the University of Fribourg – scored perfect 100’s in energy, architecture and engineering categories.

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Reality is, that most people who want solar power on their home actually want energy storage as well. We want energy storage because if the grid goes down, we want our house to run smoothly – day or not, sunny or cloudy. Additionally, many of us hold onto the dream of disconnecting from The Man.

At SolarPower International 2017 it was clear that the solar+energy storage hardware market – SolarEdge, Sonnen, BYD, Kehua, Outback, Hauwei, Schneider and others – are almost ready (or in terms of Sonnen/SolarEdge/Schneider – ready today) to serve the home energy demands of the broader population.

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Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial and political review/analysis of important green energy news.

Amish phone booths – McKenna trained a local high-school physics teacher to do installations. About 50 of them are off the grid. One lights up the gazebo in the local cemetery; others are phone booths meant especially for the Amish. Since religious principle dictates no electricity at home, they rely on the booths as a crucial link to the outside world.  The article is really about solar power in Trump voting areas, but the Amish piece caught my attention. Solving problems with solar.

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Most energy industry watchers saw the growth of energy storage to be inevitable in order to support renewable energy growth and to stabilize the grid, but deployment had been slow until now.

Several new projects coming online during the first quarter 2017 made it the first significant deployment of energy storage in the US to date: 234 megawatt-hours of energy storage.
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New NREL report details installed costs and deployment barriers for residential solar+storage – If you really want to do some research on what your battery system is going to cost, and why, start here. NREL reports are always top notch – I distribute them often (and maybe some of you should download this stuff before Pruitt deletes it).

South Australia getting 100MW energy storage plus 330MW of solar – Is 100MW the largest battery system connected to a power grid? How do they go from announced last night to built before end of year? Or that’s right – solar + storage. And, most interestingly, it isn’t Elon Musk doing the deal. These Australians move fast when the electricity stops running.

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As I reported on the new offshore wind strategy by the United States yesterday, Scotland was busy welcoming the beginning phase of the world’s first, and largest underwater tidal energy farm which will be placed off the north coast of Scotland. The first out of the four planned turbines sits at a height of 49 ft, 53 ft in diameter and over 40,000 lbs with a capacity of 1.5 megawatts (MW).

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On Sunday, Scotland produced 106% of its electricity needs -over a 24 hour period – via wind farms. Scotland joins a select group of countries that have had peak moments (or days/months/forever) when their electricity needs comes from non-polluting renewable energy. Iceland runs completely on hydroelectric and geothermal, Costa Rica ran for 75 straight days in 2015, Portugal ran for four days, Denmark generated 140% of their demand, Germany broke 95% for a few moments and there are many other countries with wonderful clean energy achievements. With places like Hawaii aiming for 100%, Rhode Island building its first off shore wind farm and the US Department of energy readying the mainland’s grid to be able to handle 100% – we will see reports like this proliferate in the future.

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On May 26, 2016 – “U.S. Rep. Mike Honda (D-Silicon Valley, Calif.)  introduced H.R. 5350, the bipartisan Energy Storage for Grid Resilience and Modernization Act. Honda was joined by Reps. Chris Gibson (R-NY), Tom Reed (R-NY) and Mark Takano (D-CA).” The purpose of the legislation is to clarify that energy storage industry receives a 30% tax credit equivalent in nature to what the Renewable Energy industry gets. The 30% Solar Power Tax Credit, is credited with being one of the major drivers for the solar power installation boom in the United States.

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SolarCity will produce the electricity, Tesla Energy will store it – and the SolarCity Utilities Services will deliver it to you at night. Recently, Tesla said they would install more energy storage with Solarcity in 2016 than the USA installed in 2015. This morning SolarCity put out two press releases – one announcing the focus on Utility and Grid Services and a second regarding a 13MWAC solar power systems and at least 1.5 megawatts/6 megawatt-hour of storage with the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative (pictured above). Is all of this a warm up to build a (solar)city on Mars?

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It looks like Tesla is about to change the battery game – this time by installing more energy storage capacity in 2016 with SolarCity alone than all of the USA installed in 2015. In a recent filing with the SEC, it was found that Tesla foresees an almost 10X increase in sales to SolarCity for behind the meter storage.

We recognized approximately $4.9 million in revenue from SolarCity during fiscal year 2015 for sales of energy storage products governed by this master supply agreement, and anticipate recognizing approximately $44.0 million in such revenues during fiscal year 2016.

Source

According to an analysis by GTM’s Ravi Manghan this revenue projection means Tesla expects to install approximately 116 MWh of behind the meter storage. In all of 2015, the United States installed about 76 MWh of behind the meter. Starting from a very low base, SolarCity and Tesla Energy doubled their battery installation volume last year. These were small installations at test locations for special customers, but that wall of ‘start up’ is already starting to fall.
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SunEdison, the world’s largest renewable-energy developer, has been going through some serious financial troubles for a while now and could reportedly file for bankruptcy as soon as this week. Its stock (SUNE) lost 98% of its value over the past 12 months and people are starting to jump ship.

Through the troubles, Electrek has learned that Tesla hired a key member of SunEdison’s energy storage team.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk often refers to a company simply as “a group of people getting together to make a product”, which is exactly what the automaker is doing with its ‘Tesla Energy’ division.

The Palo Alto-based company has been assembling an impressive team around its stationary energy storage products, and even transferred several key players from its core business to lead the initiative, which goes a long way to show how Tesla sees its energy division as an integral part of its business going forward.
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The U.S. Department of Energy announced this week a $4 million award to Austin Energy, a publicly owned electric utility, and its partners, which include Tesla Energy, for the ‘Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV’ (SHINES) project under the Energy Department’s Grid Modernization Initiative.
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Panasonic confirmed being a partner in Tesla’s battery factory early in the development of the project, but other than some estimates from Tesla, the electronic giant never committed to a dollar amount in investment until today.

Tesla made clear its plan to remain in control of the project and to contribute the majority of the estimated $4 billion to $5 billion investment required to build its massive battery factory. Panasonic confirmed today that it plans to invest between $1.5 billion and $1.6 billion in the Gigafactory.
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Following last week’s announcement to invest $1 million in battery research with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Tesla Motors opened its Gigafactory internship program for applications while visiting the University of Nevada, Reno earlier this week.
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SolarCity announced today a new project with the Temecula Valley Unified School District to install 6 MW of solar energy capacity and 2.6 MWh of energy storage at a total of 19 schools in the district. The solar installations will mainly consist of carports using the company’s ZS Beam system (see picture above).
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