energy storage

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.
Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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).

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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?

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.
Expand
Expanding
Close

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.
Expand
Expanding
Close

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.
Expand
Expanding
Close

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.
Expand
Expanding
Close

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.
Expand
Expanding
Close

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.
Expand
Expanding
Close

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).
Expand
Expanding
Close

Tesla Motors confirmed to Electrek that the company is now installing the Powerwall, a new home energy storage system, for “pilot customers”:

“We are currently in production and have started installing Powerwalls with pilot customers. Over the next few weeks we will continue to ramp up volume production,” Tesla spokeswoman Alexis Georgeson said.
Expand
Expanding
Close

SolarCity announced today that the company signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Kaua’i electric utility (KIUC). SolarCity already built a 12-megawatt solar array for KUIC which  went into operation in September 2014 and now supplies 5% of the island’s electricity, but under the new deal, the California-based solar installer will develop a new solar array and a massive 52 MWh energy storage system to provide electricity when the sun is down.
Expand
Expanding
Close

According to a report from the San Diego Union-Tribune, Tesla inked a deal to install battery packs at 3 Escondido high schools in the San Diego County school districts. The 3 projects are approved to start installation in a few weeks and be completed by the end of the year – making the deal one of the biggest to date for Tesla’s new energy storage products.
Expand
Expanding
Close

The deal is to supply “Powerpacks”, the commercial and utility scale version of Tesla’s Powerwall, to Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS). The startup, which offers technology-agnostic services to deploy energy storage systems, said the deal was the first battery supply agreement and more will come.

Expand
Expanding
Close