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Battery storage for solar now a very big deal

This huge deal is the latest evidence that the battery revolution has arrived, WP   By Chris Mooney December 15 At the Paris climate change conference earlier this month, all eyes were on some massive announcements in the solar and wind energy space — including plans in Africa to install 300 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity across the continent by the year 2030. A gigawatt is a billion watts — and this would be nearly double the electricity capacity that the continent currently supports.

Less noticed, however, is that a key enabling technology for solar — and for the future of clean energy — is also starting to grow: Energy storage. When solar systems are connected with batteries or other forms of storage, they can cease to be dependent upon whether the sun is shining and how strong its rays are at a given moment. Rather, solar energy can be stored and used at a later time. Including at night.

And now AES, a large energy company headquartered in Arlington, Va., has announced a very large deal in the battery space. It is gaining access to 1 gigawatt-hour worth of lithium ion batteries from Seoul-based LG Chem, a chemicals giant that also has a strong business in making lithium ion batteries for electric and hybrid electric vehicles. The batteries will be deployed in AES’s Advancion platform, which provides large scale grid energy storage to utility companies.

Power – in this case, a gigawatt – refers to the amount of electricity that can be discharged instantaneously. But when it comes to batteries, what’s also important is how long the battery can operate — its energy. Thus, 1 gigawatt hour would refer to the capacity to discharge that much power for one hour — but it could also refer to the ability to discharge 250 megawatts (or million watts) for four hours.

Either way, that’s a very large amount of batteries. For comparison, GTM Research recently forecast that the U.S. will deploy a record 192 megawatts of energy storage in 2015.

But for now, the biggest business for batteries isn’t in the home, where they can serve a backup role in the event of an outage or pair with a rooftop solar system; it’s on the grid, where there is a constant need to be able to manage shifting electricity demand at different times of the day. Batteries that can switch on automatically at key moments can provide a major grid service, which is why they’re seeing more and more demand.

Thus, AES is in effect packaging lots of batteries, provided by LG Chem, into large systems that large power companies can purchase and then install or integrate on the grid wherever they need this new capacity. AES directly advertises its batteries as the “complete alternative” to “peaking power plants.”

December 18, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, energy storage