London, 12 June 2010

With the utility world watching, California is poised to set the nation’s first requirement for utility companies to develop energy storage systems. Energy storage systems create uninterrupted energy supply to the grid and may support renewable energy integration. The energy storage systems may give utilities the ability to store wind or solar energy temporarily and then release it when loads are higher during peak demand. Types of storage efforts include but are not limited to compressed air storage in underground geologic formations, use of batteries, flywheels and pumped hydro. Additionally, the level at which energy storage is implemented varies widely from commercially strong applications of pumped hydro and compressed air to several developing battery projects that are either in pilot-scale or demonstration phases.

Members of the California State Assembly approved a bill during the first week of June to create energy storage programs. The bill now moves to the state senate. Under the bill, the state’s public utilities commission has until March 2012 to establish targets for investor owned utilities to create cost effective energy storage systems. Publicly owned utilities would have comparable requirements and both have a deadline of December 2015 to make a system operational.

Janice Lin, director of the California Energy Storage Alliance, said the movement has support from the state’s utilities and she expects other states to follow the lead of California by requiring storage efforts. “The energy storage field is about as diverse as the renewable energy area,” Lin said, adding that she expects to see a competitive field emerge between the various types of storage technologies.

With the establishment of a network of advocates for increased energy storage efforts, coupled with millions in government funding for research, a whirl-wind of activity has popped up in development of batteries, especially for electric vehicles.

In regards to utility scale energy storage funded by the ARRA, Eagle Picher Technologies was awarded $7.2 million for study of high energy, low cost planar liquid sodium beta batteries. The Massachusetts Institute for Technology was awarded $6.9 million for study of an all liquid metal grid-scale battery. Both of the projects may enable continuous power from renewable resources like wind and solar while helping create a stable and reliable grid. In March an additional $106 million was awarded through the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. Ten of the grants went to projects focusing on battery research within the electric vehicle sector. All of the grants were awarded to small businesses, large corporations, national labs and educational institutions.

Another DOE program titled Grid-Scale Rampable Intermittent Dispatchable Storage or GRIDS, aims to focus on technology prototyping and proof-of-concept research and development for batteries that may ultimately reach megawatt and megawatt-hour sizes. Application submission deadline was at the end of May.

Minnesota-based Xcel Energy is expected to release preliminary data in July regarding their wind-to-battery system, Patti Nystuen, a company spokesperson said. The test project was started in late 2008 and was the first use of direct wind energy storage in the U.S., company officials said. The project is using a 7.2 megawatt hour sodium- sulfur battery to store and manage energy created from an adjacent 11 megawatt wind farm. The company purchased the 80 ton battery from the Japanese firm NGK Insulators Ltd. The battery type was chosen because of its high storage capacity, ability to handle a large number of charge and recharge cycles and its potential for greater utility scale.

While the use of flywheels for frequency regulation has developed over the past few years, the idea to use their ability to store energy from renewable sources may also be gaining strength. Massachusetts based Beacon Power Corporation appears to be leading the way in flywheel technology.

The company is focused on frequency regulation uses of flywheels including the ongoing construction of a 20 megawatt plant in New York. The plant is designed to regulate frequency by absorbing electricity from the grid when there is too much, and storing it as kinetic energy in a matrix of flywheel systems, a company press release reported. When there is not enough power to meet demand, the flywheels inject energy back into the grid, thus helping to maintain proper electricity frequency. In March the company partnered with California Energy Commission, Alternative Energy Systems Consulting, the California Independent System Operator and Southern California Edison to install a flywheel energy storage system at a wind farm.

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