The decade of energy storage?

According to the clean technology consultancy Navigant Research, distributed energy storage system revenues are expected to skyrocket from $452 million in 2014 to more than $16 billion in 2024.

Ensuring that the reduction of the CO₂ impact of the energy chain accelerates, will be in part dependent on the change in the energy mix towards a much higher proportion of renewable generation, which in turn is reliant on energy storage for success. Energy storage will also help mitigate energy risk, by improving grid stability, enabling sites to continue to function during power fluctuations and outages.

In Europe, the growth is expected to be particularly marked, says Andreea Strachinescu, European Commission Head of Unit for New Energy Technologies, Innovation and Clean Coal. “A growing number of renewable energy sources in Europe will require breakthrough technologies for grid stabilisation and balancing. Electrical energy storage can play a key role in the enhanced use of renewable energy and development of smart grids in Europe. Emerging market models will be pivotal for large scale deployment of electrical energy storage in Europe.”

The value of energy storage and control differs depending upon end user. Targeting residential and commercial users, Eaton has joined forces with the car maker Nissan to develop a single unit that combines several aspects of energy storage and needs in one system.

The Eaton/Nissan development is a way of giving second-life to old lithium-ion battery packs that have degraded after several years’ use in its Leaf vehicles.

System lifecycle

In terms of system lifecycle, car battery capacity would usually degrade by around 25% over several years of standard automotive operation, and it is at this point that they would be considered for second-life energy storage use. Nissan says that, depending on their usage, the batteries in the energy storage unit would then be expected to last between five and 10 years. And with more than 200,000 Nissan EVs sold since launch,  it represents multiple gigawatt hours of energy storage capacity. The Eaton UPS acts as the brain of the system, with the second-life batteries providing the storage capacity.

The system can take multiple energy inputs from renewable sources such as solar and the grid - the UPS is programmed to select the optimum mix of power sources according to load, grid constraints and availability of renewables.

For larger industrial and grid-scale requirements, Eaton plans to offer the AES Advancion Energy Storage Platform, aimed at utilities, industrial and large commercial customers, independent power producers and power system operators, Advancion 4 features a patented distributed control system that enable customers to maximise revenue, reduce operating costs, and meet the highest levels of system reliability.

The Advancion system is constructed from certified, long-life and high-efficiency sealed batteries. It also features a modular architecture where additional nodes can be added for increased output. The scalable design allows for standard modular configurations to over 1,000MW, and from 15-minutes of duration to over four hours without any reengineering.

In Northern Ireland, 10MW of interconnected battery-based energy storage has been installed at the Kilroot Power Station near Carrickfergus. The installation marks the first step towards a planned 100MW array adjacent to the coal, oil and biomass fuelled power station in an attempt to develop a dependable, smart and cost-competitive means to support the development of a low carbon electricity system.

The most recent application of Advancion saw Panasonic India and AES India construct a 10MW energy storage array at Panasonic’s Technopark manufacturing facility in Jhajjar, Haryana.