 "Vandana Gombar: The home, the plant and the car")
The Tesla Powerwall is a nifty piece of equipment. The compact home battery system can store power generated from your solar rooftop panels, to be used when there is no sun. Weighing about 100 kg, this lithium-ion battery "requires no maintenance", according to the company.
The Powerwall can also be charged using conventional sources of power supply during non-peak time and be used to replace high-priced peak-time power. Obviously, the equipment makes sense only if the retail price of power is high enough to enable successful arbitrage. This is possible in a country like Australia, which is seen as a ripe storage market and a good testing ground.
A sufficiently large number of Powerwalls can, in effect, reduce the peakiness of power demand. It can obviate the need to set up plants just to meet peak demand.
In cities where electric mobility is on the rise, batteries in cars can play a role in grid management. Nissan Motor - which produces the Leaf electric car - pioneered the Leaf-to-Home concept two years ago, allowing the stored power to be used at home or fed into the grid. "We believe electric car owners will be able to earn around Euro 1,000 to 2,000 ($1,100 to $2,200) per year using our vehicle-to-grid technology," Gareth Dunsmore, general manager of electric vehicles at Nissan's European division, said in a recent interview.
The case for larger, megawatt-scale storage has become stronger with the increasing penetration of renewables. Such storage is being deployed for frequency regulation and supply management, among other things, in the US, Korea, Japan and Germany. Battery options include lead-acid, lithium-ion, lithium titanate, lithium-iron phosphate and even liquid-air energy storage.
As an example, the recently commissioned project, Mc Henry Storage, in the US state of Illinois added 20 megawatts of flexible capacity to the PJM regional transmission organisation. EDF Renewable Energy is the owner of the project. BYD America supplied the lithium-ion battery and power electronics.
Should the large, megawatt-scale storage systems be talking to the smaller, kilowatt-scale systems? Can these be virtually aggregated? Should demand response play a larger role in grid management? These are some of the questions to which the industry is seeking answers. Japan, for instance, has been piloting such projects with support from the government.
India made its first move towards large-scale storage last month, with the Solar Energy Corporation of India seeking to include energy storage as a requirement in its next tender. The company will ask bidders to include a storage component in 100 megawatts of the 750 megawatts of solar capacity to be tendered in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, managing director Ashvini Kumar told Bloomberg News in an interview.
India will also need what is called behind-the-meter storage if it does end up installing the targeted 40 gigawatts of rooftop solar projects by 2022.
The critical factor for storage in India - as it is elsewhere - is cost, and, specifically, the speed of the decline in costs. In a recent interview with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Power and Renewable Energy Minister Piyush Goyal said that he looked forward to lower prices for storage. "Having said that, as far as it [storage] becoming competitive for a country like India is concerned, we are still a long way off," he said.
The cost of a battery pack in the next 10 years could be less than half what it is today, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and that is without factoring in any disruptive technological changes. A storage system is, meanwhile, competitive today for the tens of thousands of telecom towers spread across the country that use expensive diesel for power back-up.
The author is editor, Global Policy, for Bloomberg New Energy Finance; vgombar@bloomberg.net
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
