GlidePath has added 149 MW of wind power to its portfolio in North Texas, with plans for battery storage expansion.

This latest acquisition brings GlidePath’s operating portfolio to more than 445 MW, in addition to its development pipeline of more than 1 GW of battery storage projects across the United States. GlidePath is a portfolio company of Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, a specialist investor in low-carbon and renewable energy infrastructure.

The wind portfolio, acquired from Exelon Generation, is comprised of eight distributed wind energy projects located north of Amarillo that serve the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) market. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

GlidePath’s operations team will optimize the performance of the wind farms while the company explores opportunities to develop on-site battery storage systems, which it is believed would be the first battery storage projects in SPP territory.

“The high penetration of wind energy in North Texas offers us an excellent opportunity to pair these facilities with the latest battery storage technology,” said David Braun, President of GlidePath Asset Management. “We look forward to managing these wind assets in a way that will hopefully strengthen reliability of supply in the local electric grid and deliver benefits for Texas power consumers.”

This acquisition follows GlidePath’s recent announcement of the Prospect Storage project, a 10-MW/MWh standalone battery project located in the ERCOT market about 50 miles south of Houston. Prospect Storage is currently in advanced construction.

GlidePath’s development pipeline of more than 1 GW of battery storage projects includes multiple new facilities at various stages of permitting approval and pre-construction planning in New York, Texas and throughout the PJM grid operator’s service territory.

The post New deal opens opportunities for wind + storage development in Southwest Power Pool appeared first on Windpower Engineering & Development.

The new Energy Storage Research Center will offer a resource for the industry to test and develop energy storage technologies needed to better integrate renewable energy into the power grid, as well as improve reliability and resiliency. (Photo: Southern Company)

Located on the engineering campus of Southern Research in Birmingham, Alabama, the project is a collaboration between Southern Company, Alabama Power, Southern Research, the Electric Power Research Institute, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the state of Alabama.

“As an R&D leader, Southern Company continues to advance technologies that can help us better meet customers’ needs in the rapidly evolving energy landscape,” said Southern Company R&D Director Roxann Walsh during a ribbon-cutting ceremony this week.

The center will initially evaluate a flow battery system developed by Avalon Battery. Flow batteries are a type of chemical energy storage technology that can offer longer cycle life and quick response times. The Energy Storage Research Center is one of several residential, commercial, industrial, and utility-scale battery storage R&D projects across the Southern Company system’s Southeastern service territory.

“The Energy Storage Research Center will broaden our work with stakeholders and technology developers to better understand energy storage systems and how to fully use this technology to build the future of energy,” added Walsh.

Southern Company’s R&D strategy includes participating in collaborative research projects that bring together innovators from the electric utility sector, academia, government and industry to research, develop and demonstrate critical technology solutions.

“We will need newer, better, more cost-effective energy storage in a low-carbon future – and R&D efforts like the Energy Storage Research Center will help bring these cutting-edge technologies to full deployment,” said Walsh.

The post Southern Company launches new Energy Storage Research Center appeared first on Windpower Engineering & Development.

This 122-fold boom of stationary energy storage over the next two decades will require $662 billion of investment, according to BNEF estimates. It will be made possible by further sharp declines in the cost of lithium-ion batteries, on top of an 85% reduction in the 2010-18 period.

Global cumulative energy storage installations (Source: BNEF)

BNEF’s Energy Storage Outlook 2019, published today, predicts a further halving of lithium-ion battery costs per kilowatt-hour by 2030, as demand takes off in two different markets – stationary storage and electric vehicles. The report goes on to model the impact of this on a global electricity system increasingly penetrated by low-cost wind and solar.

“Two big changes this year are that we have raised our estimate of the investment that will go into energy storage by 2040 by more than $40 billion, and that we now think the majority of new capacity will be utility-scale, rather than behind-the-meter at homes and businesses,” said Yayoi Sekine, energy storage analyst for BNEF and co-author of the report.

BNEF’s analysis suggests that cheaper batteries can be used in more and more applications. These include energy shifting (moving in time the dispatch of electricity to the grid, often from times of excess solar and wind generation), peaking in the bulk power system (to deal with demand spikes), as well as for customers looking to save on their energy bills by buying electricity at cheap hours and using it later.

Logan Goldie-Scot, head of energy storage at BNEF, said: “In the near term, renewables-plus-storage, especially solar-plus-storage, has become a major driver for battery build. This is a new era of dispatchable renewables, based on new contract structures between developer and grid.”

Just 10 countries are on course to represent almost three quarters of the global market in gigawatt terms, according to BNEF’s forecast. South Korea is the lead market in 2019, but will soon cede that position, with China and the U.S. far in front by 2040. The remaining significant markets include India, Germany, Latin America, Southeast Asia, France, Australia and the U.K.

There is a fundamental transition developing in the power system and transportation sector. Falling wind, solar and battery costs mean wind and solar are set to make up almost 40% of world electricity in 2040, up from 7% today. Meanwhile passenger electric vehicles could become a third of the global passenger vehicle fleet by 2040, up from less than half a percent today, adding huge scale to the battery manufacturing sector.

Demand for storage will increase to balance the higher proportion of variable, renewable generation in the electricity system. Batteries will increasingly be chosen to manage this dynamic supply and demand mix.

The report finds that energy storage will become a practical alternative to new-build electricity generation or network reinforcement. Behind-the-meter storage will also increasingly be used to provide system services on top of customer applications.

The total demand for batteries from the stationary storage and electric transport sectors is forecast to be 4,584GWh by 2040, providing a major opportunity for battery makers and miners of component metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel. 

The post BNEF: Energy storage investments boom as battery costs halve in next decade appeared first on Windpower Engineering & Development.