If we have renewable energy, we’re going to need better ways to store and distribute the energy, according to an afternoon session titled “Behind the Distributed Data & Storage in Alternative Energy” at the GoingGreen conference.
The panelists shared the work and initiatives of their companies. Primus Power has a zinc-based flow battery, and a project to provide a 25-megawatt battery system to the Modesto area next year. Powergetics develops energy applications for commercial businesses to save money, leveraging things like alternative energy and energy storage. Solar City is a vertically integrated solar generation developer, Rive said, which seems to mean it both installs and finances solar systems. It offers customers in California lower-priced power than the incumbent utility by putting up solar systems. He is looking at storage, but it often isn’t economic.
Storage is important, Stepien said, because the percentage of renewable energy is increasing, but renewables are inherently unreliable; solar produces more power in the day and wind produces more at night. Peak energy is a big problem that storage can solve. Thompson sees energy storage on the customer side as an emerging market and government policies are also pushing it.
Stepien talked about Bonneville Power Authority’s (BPA) problem with delivering peak energy power. When the water runs, it produces a lot of power. Since it’s hard to reduce the energy from a coal plant, typically wind power is drawn down. If that can instead be stored, it would be much more efficient, he said.
Rive brought up the need to distribute power in places like downtown areas at essential times. In turn, Hart mentioned a demonstration project in Hawaii that dispatches energy accordingly.
New regulations are coming, Pfund said. Laws, both on the state level in California and on the federal level, make utilities look more at storage, Stepien said. While there are government incentives for storage, Thompson worries that sometimes incentives distort the market.
Thompson and Rive discussed whether utilities should be able to include storage in their rate bases.
Rive said customers who have “spiky” demands could really use storage solutions today, but with a government incentive, it would make sense for a lot more companies.
There will be many more applications if the price of storage drops to $500 to $1000 per kilowatt hour, but, Stepien said, prices are inevitably going down and companies need flexible business models. Thompson noted that even though the price of batteries is falling, end-user companies have to take into account the cost of the entire energy system.
In this market, Thompson said, prices will decline in part because electric vehicles are using the best batteries, which leads to better and more batteries. There will always be some batteries that don’t meet the needs of the vehicles, but these would be great for general energy storage.
When asked about the market for energy storage in utilities, Thompson noted that the jury is still out because of concerns about the number of usable cycles of the batteries. Stepien thought smaller utilities would be the first to use these.
Addressing large-scale deployments, panelists mostly agreed that energy storage will start with private enterprise and subsidized power before heading toward the more mainstream utilities.
The panelists also discussed partnering with companies in other countries. China needs power, as does India, which has a fragile grid. Japan now has more utility energy storage than any country. However, Rive argued, any country that considers renewable energy will also need energy storage, though it often lags a bit.