NEW YORK --
There’s a crowded field of companies jostling Elon Musk for the most
innovative breakthrough solution to his challenge to “fundamentally
change the way the world uses energy.” While the chairman of Tesla Motors Inc. re-purposes the lithium-ion batteries
that power his cars for use in homes and businesses, others are working
on more radical approaches to the riddle of energy storage — using
everything from vats of molten salt to rooftop tanks filled with ice.
Meeting the need for energy on demand is not just a
way to cut your power bill, it’s also vital to expanded use of solar and
wind, intermittent resources that require backup. Traditionally
electricity has had to be used when it’s created. “We’re at the very beginning of this quickly
developing market,” said Mike Hopkins, chief executive officer of Ice
Energy Holdings Inc., a Santa Barbara, California-based company that’s
pioneering a storage method using rooftop ice. “If there’s really going
to be continued progress on the integration of renewables, it’s
absolutely essential that energy storage steps up.”
His company’s refrigerator-sized Ice Bear units
are installed on the roofs of commercial buildings and connected to air
conditioning systems. They freeze water at night when power rates are
low, and provide cooling during the day. When they’re switched on, the
building’s electricity consumption is reduced, freeing up capacity for
the local utility.
Ice Storage
Ice Energy is one of five companies
that signed deals with Edison International’s Southern California
Edison in November to provide a total of 261 megawatts of storage
capacity. The utility will use the storage to help meet a
statewide goal of getting half of its electricity from renewable sources
by 2030.
Two years ago, California regulators asked the state’s
three biggest utilities to add 1.33 gigawatts of energy-storage
capacity by 2020 -- about 20 percent more than currently exists in the
world, excluding pumped hydropower systems.
Ice Energy will install 1,800 Ice Bears across the region, adding about 25.6 megawatts of storage capacity for Edison. “Storage has a big role to play in our market,” said
Colin Cushnie, the utility’s vice president for energy procurement and
management. “We were pleasantly surprised that energy storage was more
cost-competitive that we thought.” Existing batteries “suck,” Musk said Thursday at the
rollout of his equipment for homes, businesses and utilities. “They’re
expensive, they’re unreliable.”
California Standards
If the storage breakthrough is coming, it seems obvious it would happen in California, which has long led the U.S. in supporting alternative energy.
The state has the most demanding fuel-efficiency standards for cars, as
well as incentives that have made it the biggest market for solar power
in the U.S.
California “is often a lab” for the rest of the
country, said Brian Warshay, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
It will “continue to be so on the storage front.” Older methods of trying to store power have existed
for decades, including pumped hydropower facilities in which water is
sent to higher elevation reservoirs and released through lower turbines
to produce electricity when demand is high.
Another storage effort that’s getting revived interest
is compressed air. Dresser Rand Group Inc., which built one of the
world’s two operating commercial systems using the technology, is
working on projects in Texas that would force air underground into
caverns until it’s released and heated to power a turbine.
Molten Salt
Spain’s Abengoa SA is developing a solar-thermal project in
California that will incorporate power storage. Arrays of mirrors will
focus sunlight on a central tower, where a boiler will drive a turbine
to produce electricity. Vats of molten salt will retain some of that
heat so the plant will run after sundown.
Batteries have been used on for years a smaller level
to balance grid needs. With added renewables on the system, batteries
have been getting bigger to help utilities handle the influx of
intermittent resources. They make up the bulk of Southern California
Edison’s storage agreements. AES Corp. is planning a 100-megawatt battery array in
Long Beach, California, that will be one of the biggest in the world.
The batteries will function much like a peaking natural gas plant,
standing by until demand spikes and then immediately dumping more
electricity onto the grid, said Praveen Kathpal, a vice president with
the Arlington, Virginia-based company’s AES Energy Storage unit.
‘New Scale’
AES will receive a flat monthly fee for the system to be available, plus a variable amount depending on how much energy is used. “It represents a new scale at which energy storage
resources are being contemplated,” said Kathpal. “A hundred megawatts is
the tip of the iceberg.”
All the storage projects will reshape the ways
electricity must be produced and delivered, Edison’s Cushnie said.
Storing power for later is more efficient and reduces the need for new
power plants. “People are still figuring out the business models,”
said BNEF’s Warshay. “They can see the business models, but they can’t
believe they will make money.”
Copyright 2015 Bloomberg
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2015/05/teslas-competitors-jostle-to-solve-riddle-of-energy-storage
No comments:
Post a Comment