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California’s SMUD Enters Agreement to Deploy Long Duration Energy Storage

September 21, 2022

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
September 21, 2022

California public power utility SMUD and ESS Inc. on Sept. 20 announced an agreement to provide up to 200 megawatts (MW)/2 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of long duration energy storage (LDES) that will be provided by ESS.

The agreement calls for ESS to deliver a mix of its long-duration energy storage LDES technology for integration with the SMUD electric grid beginning in 2023.

SMUD will deploy the LDES systems in support of its 2030 zero carbon plan, which aims to reduce thermal generation, maximize local solar generation, provide neighborhood resiliency, and increase social justice and equity. LDES is a key component in SMUD’s decarbonization plan, without compromising reliability or low electricity rates, SMUD said.

As part of this multi-year agreement, ESS intends to set up facilities for battery system assembly, operations and maintenance support and project delivery in Sacramento, creating local, high paying jobs.

In addition, SMUD and ESS plan to establish a Center of Excellence to expand the workforce and knowledge base for LDES technology in partnership with higher education institutions.

The center will provide advanced LDES technical training, creating a statewide skilled talent pool to help build and maintain California’s fast-growing long-duration energy storage resources.

ESS manufactures long-duration iron flow batteries for commercial and utility-scale energy storage applications.

The American Public Power Association’s Public Power Energy Tracker is a resource for association members that summarizes public power energy storage projects that are currently online. The tracker is available here.

U.S. Energy Storage Market Set New Record In Second Quarter 2022

September 18, 2022

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
September 18, 2022

The U.S. energy storage market set a new record in the second quarter of 2022, with grid-scale installations totaling 2,608 megawatt hours (MWh), the highest installed capacity for any second quarter on record, according to a new report released Sept. 14. 

According to Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association’s (ACP) latest U.S. Energy Storage Monitor report, grid-scale storage was boosted by a series of deployments in Texas, with the state contributing 60% of installed capacity this quarter. However, challenges to the sector remain due to delays. 

“Despite impressive growth, the U.S. grid-scale energy storage pipeline continues to face rolling delays into 2023 and beyond. More than 1.1 gigawatts (GW) of projects originally scheduled to come online in Q2 were delayed or cancelled, although 61% of this capacity, 709 megawatts (MW), is still scheduled to come online in Q3 and Q4 of 2022,” said Vanessa Witte, senior analyst with Wood Mackenzie’s energy storage team. 

“Supply chain issues, transportation delays and interconnection queue challenges were the main drivers behind delays in the commercial operations date for many projects,” Witte added.  

The U.S. Congress passed a solar investment tax credit (ITC) extension and standalone storage ITC as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The new law will support all segments of the energy storage industry, increasing deployment of solar-plus-storage systems while also incentivizing standalone facilities, Wood Mackenzie and ACP said. As a result, Wood Mackenzie forecasts 59.2 GW of energy storage capacity to be added through 2026. 

Residential storage also had its strongest quarter to date with 375 MWh installed in Q2, beating the previous quarterly record of 334.1 MWh in Q1 2022.  

Demand is rising in the residential segment with over 150 MW of residential storage installed for the first time, but ongoing supply shortfalls and rising prices have suppressed deployment. New solar installers continue to add storage to their product offerings, despite ongoing procurement issues. 

Community, commercial and industrial (CCI) storage continues to lag behind other market segments, with only 59.4 MWh of CCI storage installations seen this quarter, making it the lowest quarter recorded for MWh capacity since 2019.

New York Awards $16.6 Million For Long-Duration Storage Projects

September 8, 2022

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
September 8, 2022

New York recently announced $16.6 million in awards for five long duration energy storage projects, as well as $17 million in competitive funding available for projects that advance development and demonstration of scalable long duration energy storage technologies, including hydrogen.

The five long duration projects awards are going to:

The additional $17 million in funding is targeted at the development and demonstration of energy storage projects that are 10 to over 100 hours in duration at rated power.

Parties submitting bids for the awards, which is being administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), must only include innovative, long duration energy storage technologies that are not yet commercialized. NYSERDA will make awards in the following project categories: product development, demonstration projects, and federal cost-share projects.

The state agency said submissions should advance, develop or field-test hydrogen, electric, chemical, mechanical or thermal-electric storage technologies that will address cost, performance, siting and renewable integration challenges, such as grid congestion, hosting capacity constraints, and lithium-ion siting in New York City. The deadline for proposals is Oct. 17, 2022.

Fire Department regulations make siting lithium-ion batteries difficult in New York City.

This type of funding support is critical to ensuring that stored renewable energy from solar or wind is available for long periods of time and can be utilized to ensure a reliable grid of the future.” Doreen Harris, president and CEO of NYSERDA and co-chair of the Climate Action Council, said in a statement.

The projects are intended to support New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which aims to install 3,000 megawatts (MW) of energy storage by 2030 while facilitating further development to 6,000 MW of energy storage.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has directed NYSERDA and the departments of Public Service and the Environmental Conservation with developing a regulatory clean hydrogen framework to measure emissions reductions and health benefits. Those efforts also include a clean hydrogen demonstration project for district heating and cooling, a Clean Hydrogen Prize Program to support   clean hydrogen firms seeking to expand in the state, and the release of $27 million in NYSERDA Hydrogen Innovation funding to support product development and pilot and demonstrations projects,

Earlier this month, Maine and Rhode Island joined a New York-led multi-state clean hydrogen hub, expanding membership to include six states in the New England-MidAtlantic region.

Pascoag Utility District, Agilitas Energy Bring R.I.’s First Utility Scale Battery Online

September 7, 2022

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
September 7, 2022

Pascoag Utility District (PUD), in partnership with Agilitas Energy, in July brought Rhode Island’s first utility scale a battery storage project online.

For Pascoag Utility District, the 3-megawatt (MW), 9-megawatt hour (MWh) battery installation helps it shave peak demand and deferred transmission costs. The public power utility entered the project as a non-wires alternative solution to upgrading or installing new transmission lines, which would have cost Pascoag between $6 million and $12 million.

“This project allowed us to save up to $12 million dollars for our customers by avoiding a costly rebuilding of transmission infrastructure,” Mike Kirkwood, general manager of Pascoag Utility District, said in a statement.

There was no cost associated with the project for Pascoag, however, the utility did complete work on a substation that was required for the battery project.

PUD received a grant of $250,000 from Rhode Island’s Office of Energy Resources (OER) for the substation project, which was also funded by an $1.4 million loan from the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank and approved by OER through the state’s Efficient Building Fund program.

For its part, “Agilitas invested the necessary capital for construction, completed the engineering, procurement and construction for the battery project, and worked with PUD to commission this project,” Barrett Bilotta, president of Agilitas Energy, said via email. As part of the deal, Agilitas will split the transmission and capacity savings with the utility district. The savings come from avoided regional network service charges and installed capacity (ICAP) charges assessed by ISO-New England based on PUD’s peak load.

Agilitas, which owns and operates the battery project, uses it to provide energy to ISO New England grid when wholesale electric prices are high and charges the batteries from the grid when electric prices are low.

“As demand grows due to increased electrification and extreme weather conditions, we want to ensure Pascoag and Harrisville residents experience the same service and value they’ve come to expect,” Kirkwood said. “This project from Agilitas Energy was an easy, no-risk way to keep our operating costs down and deliver cleaner energy in the most cost-effective manner.”

Agilitas, based in Wakefield, Mass., acquired the Ocean State battery project in Rhode Island in April 2021 as part of its acquisition of New England Battery Storage, which added 25 MWh of energy storage capacity to its portfolio.

DOE Report Provides Guidance On Energy Storage System Evaluations

August 21, 2022

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
August 21, 2022

A new report from the Department of Energy (DOE) provides guidance on how best to evaluate the potential of energy storage systems based on specific use-cases.

The report, Energy Storage Valuation: A Review of Use Cases and Modeling Tools, draws from publicly available tools developed by the DOE and frames their functions and capabilities in the context of three use-case “families.”

The three use-case families of the DOE’s Energy Storage Grand Challenge are:

The DOE report provides a methodology for stakeholders to determine which DOE modeling tool is best suited to value an energy storage system for a specific use-case.

“In addition to the need for cost and performance improvements for storage technologies, there is a need for robust valuation methods to enable effective policy, investment, business models, and resource planning,” the report’s authors wrote.

With respect to that goal, the report identified the high-level objectives for the report:

Berkeley Lab Study Looks At Battery Storage And Net Billing

August 4, 2022

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
August 4, 2022

Using battery storage to manage solar self consumption is not efficient from the perspective of an individual consumer or the wholesale power grid, according to a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 

The Berkeley Lab study, Private vs. public value of U.S. residential battery storage operated for solar self-consumption, set out to quantify the value of using residential battery storage to maximize solar self-consumption from the individual solar customer and the larger power system standpoint.

The impetus of the study is the growing popularity of net billing schemes that are being put in place to replace net metering schemes that are being phased out in many states.

Net energy metering (NEM), in which residential solar exports to the grid are credited against consumption at full retail electricity price, has been the dominant compensation structure, but it has raised several concerns, including the potential for cost-shifting from solar to non-solar customers.

As the use of net metering dwindles, net billing has become the de-facto NEM successor in many states, the study said. Net billing allows customers to offset consumption with contemporaneous solar generation, but any surplus generation exported to the grid is credited at a grid export rate below the full retail electricity price, often tied to a utility’s avoided costs.

Currently, some variation of net billing has been adopted in 10 states and has been proposed in at least five others.

Using metered data from 1,800 residential customers across six utilities, the study found that batteries operated solely for self-consumption provided “customer bill savings up to $20–30 per kWh of storage capacity annually, but virtually no grid value.”

Even though net billing may save customers money on their electricity bills, it is still inefficient overall for individual customers, the Berkeley researchers found.

Nonetheless, they said, private bill savings may be enough to drive adoption when combined with the resilience value from backup power or other revenue streams.

Compared with market-based dispatch, self-consumption dispatch will likely become more severe over time, insofar as increased renewable energy penetration leads to more volatile wholesale prices, the study found.

“Storage used for solar self-consumption yields virtually no value to the bulk power system in terms of reduced wholesale energy costs,” primarily because of a misalignment between the temporal profiles of storage dispatch and wholesale energy prices, the researchers aid.

Even in “a future with high solar penetration, where wholesale prices resemble the proverbial “duck curve”, the energy value of storage dispatched for solar self-consumption remains highly suboptimal,” they added.

Storage used for solar self-consumption also yields virtually no value in terms of reduced peak-related costs, such as those related to generation, transmission, and distribution system capacity, the study found, because almost all solar generation on peak-load days is used to directly serve onsite customer load, resulting in little surplus solar energy available to fuel storage discharge during peak-load hours later in the day. As a result, battery storage largely sits idle on those days, barring some other incentive to operate for system-peak reduction purposes.

Alternatively, incentivizing storage customers to respond to market prices, particularly on peak days, would enhance both private and public value. “Compensating customers for operating storage in response to market prices can create a win-win, providing benefits to the power system while offering commensurate financial returns to PV+ storage adopters (or their aggregators) that exceed what they would receive from simply maximizing solar self-consumption,” the study’s authors wrote.

The authors noted, however, that outcome is conditional on customers being allowed to discharge storage to the grid. Unrestricted market response would significantly increase exports, which could impose stress on the local distribution network under certain conditions, but a significant portion of the potential market value could be achieved without significantly increasing exports, by relying on pricing or programmatic incentives that target storage discharge during narrow peak demand periods, the study concluded.

Florida Public Power Utility Gainesville Regional Utilities Interested In Energy Storage Options

June 22, 2022

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
June 22, 2022

Florida public power utility Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) recently issued a request for information (RFI) for energy storage.

The discharge duration for the energy storage facility should be at least 8 hours, the RFI said.

“While GRU is historically a summer peaking utility, it is trending towards becoming a dual season peaking utility. Load is forecast to increase both with population growth as well as greater electricity consumption due to electrification,” the RFI noted.

The energy storage system “will be used to reduce those peaks to fulfill its mission of providing reliable and affordably priced electricity.”

While long-duration batteries are of particular interest, GRU said it is open to other forms of energy storage. Geologic and geographic constraints preclude pumped storage and underground compressed air energy storage as viable choices. All other forms of energy storage will be reviewed.

The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) made funds available for use in developing and operating certain battery storage projects. GRU is pursuing a facility that will meet the application criteria for these grants and intends to apply for funding from the Department of Energy to partially finance this project. Novel projects that will improve the GRU’s candidacy for grant funding are preferred.

The Energy Authority (TEA) is acting as facilitator of the RFI. Responses are due July 15, 2022.

The RFI is available here.

Owned by the City of Gainesville, Fla., GRU provides electric, natural gas, water, wastewater, and communication utility services.

The American Public Power Association’s Public Power Energy Tracker is a resource for association members that summarizes public power energy storage projects that are currently online. The tracker is available here.

San Francisco PUC’s Community Choice Energy Program Signs Storage Contracts

June 11, 2022

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
June 11, 2022

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s (SFPUC) community choice energy program, CleanPowerSF, has executed two new agreements to participate in long-duration energy storage through California Community Power, a group of 10 community choice aggregation programs that procure power for their residents, businesses, and municipalities.

The two projects — the Tumbleweed Project by REV Renewables, to be located in Kern County, California, and the Goal Line Project by Onward Energy, to be located in San Diego County, California –mark the first joint procurement effort that San Francisco is participating in with California Community Power.

San Francisco’s share of the Tumbleweed Project will provide approximately 11 megawatts (MW) of battery energy storage, while its portion of the Goal Line Project will provide 10 MW of energy storage capacity.

In total, the Tumbleweed Project will provide 69 MW of battery energy storage, and the Goal Line Project will provide 50 MW. 

In recent years, CleanPowerSF has been expanding its battery storage portfolio. Earlier this year, CleanPowerSF executed a contract to add battery storage to the Blythe IV solar project in Riverside County, which provides 62 MW to CleanPowerSF customers.

The Tumbleweed and Goal Line projects represent CleanPowerSF’s first long-duration battery storage contracts.

To date, CleanPowerSF has over 200 MW of battery storage under active contract.

California Community Power was established in February 2021 to leverage the combined buying power of community choice aggregators for energy supply, programs, and services. CleanPowerSF became a member in April 2021.

Other members include Valley Clean Energy, Sonoma Clean Power, Silicon Valley Clean Energy, San Jose Clean Energy, Redwood Coast Energy Authority, Peninsula Clean Energy, MCE, East Bay Community Energy, and Central Coast Community Energy.
  
CleanPowerSF began serving customers in 2016 with a mission to provide San Francisco residents and businesses with renewable electricity at competitive rates. Today, CleanPowerSF serves about 385,000 customer accounts in San Francisco and offers 50% and 100% renewable electricity service options. Over the past six years, CleanPowerSF has helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity use by 94% from 1990 levels.
  
Along with CleanPowerSF, the SFPUC operates Hetch Hetchy Power, which generates and delivers 100 percent greenhouse gas-free energy to more than 4,000 customer accounts, including municipal buildings and facilities, such as City Hall, San Francisco International Airport, schools, libraries and the Muni transit system.

Hetch Hetchy Power also provides electricity to some commercial and residential developments, including affordable housing sites. Collectively, the two systems meet over 70 percent of the electricity demand in San Francisco.

Sandia Report Highlights Role Of Energy Storage In Energy Equity

June 6, 2022

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
June 6, 2022

Energy storage is a key component of legislation and policies being adopted by the federal government and many states, according to a new report from Sandia National Laboratories.

The report, Seeking Energy Equity Through Energy Storage, argues that energy equity is fundamental to “healthy and prosperous social and economic systems, and contributes to regional and national security and stability.” The authors also noted that energy equity is highlighted in the Biden administration’s Executive Order No. 13,985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities.

The authors of the Sandia report cite data showing that low-income households spend three-times more of their income on energy costs than more affluent households and that electricity prices have been rising at much steeper rates than other commodities.

“As a direct result of these factors, low-income households and underserved communities may be unable to afford such fundamental services as air conditioning or heating,” the Sandia report said.

Some 50 million households, or about 40% of total households, fall into the category of underserved populations that “incur an array of burdens from electricity generation that are unique to their communities,” such as pollution from nearby fossil fuel burning generation assets, more frequent outages, and lower access to technologies such as solar power and backup energy storage devices, the report said.

One solution has been community solar programs. Sixteen states have already adopted community solar programs intended to bring solar power and lower energy bills to disadvantaged communities. “Unfortunately, the vast majority of community solar subscribers have been businesses, universities, or other entities that have little trouble in paying the steep project enrollment fees for the program, while disadvantaged communities have yet to see any direct benefits,” the report said.

The report also noted that states such as New Jersey, Illinois, Colorado and New York have begun programs aimed at correcting the disparity and securing the flow of community solar benefits to disadvantaged communities.

Many states have also implemented programs to encourage the development of energy storage, including a number of state initiatives that have the potential to incorporate provisions related to serving disadvantaged communities, the report said, adding that those initiatives provide a blueprint for how energy equity policymaking may evolve. The report cited policies in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, and Illinois. The report’s authors also provided resources on how to measure equitable affordability and equitable resilience.

“If resilience, equity, environmental justice, and decarbonization are all to be prioritized together, energy storage and renewable energy will be at the heart of the technology solution,” the Sandia authors said. “To equitably provide resilience, some supply-side solutions must be sited close to vulnerable communities – providing critical services when the bulk power system fails,” they wrote. Those technologies, they said, must have very low-to-zero local pollutants and low-to-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

In conclusion, renewable energy, when coupled with energy storage, and grid-forming inverted technologies “are one of the only solutions ready today which can achieve these goals concurrently,” the report said.

Texas Generator Brings 260-Megawatt Battery Storage Project Online

May 25, 2022

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
May 25, 2022

Texas-based power generator Vistra on May 23 announced that its DeCordova Energy Storage Facility in Granbury, Texas, is now online. The 260-megawatt/260 megawatt-hour battery energy storage project is the largest of its kind in Texas, according to Vistra.

Jim Burke, Vistra president and chief financial officer, said that the facility “offers a unique value proposition — not only can this battery system provide instantaneous full power to the grid with the flip of a switch, but it is also co-located on the same site as our quick-start DeCordova natural gas-fueled power plant.”

He said that this pairing “means we essentially have a large, one-hour battery system with dispatchable, reliable generation, leading to continuity of operation and resiliency of the grid. In addition, these gas-fueled generation units have seven days of diesel backup in the event of any disruption of natural gas supplies, which is yet another example of the resiliency aspect of the Decordova site.”

First announced in September 2020, DeCordova is the second of seven new zero-carbon projects Vistra is bringing online in Texas over the next few years as part of its growing Vistra Zero portfolio. These new power generation facilities represent a nearly $1 billion capital investment by the company within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) market.

DeCordova Energy Storage Facility utilizes lithium-ion technology housed in containers that, in addition to project inverters, were supplied by Sungrow, the project integrator. Mortenson provided engineering and construction expertise.

Project construction began in June 2021 and was finished in less than a year.

Along with DeCordova and Brightside Solar Facility, Vistra is also completing the 108-MW Emerald Grove Solar Facility in Crane County ahead of summer.

The American Public Power Association’s Public Power Energy Tracker is a resource for association members that summarizes public power energy storage projects that are currently online. The tracker is available here.