Solar Energy Storage Pilot Project

April 25th, 2012 by Zachary Shahan

S&C Electric, a leading smart grid and energy storage company based out of Chicago, is starting work on a pilot project that will store solar energy using lithium-ion batteries. The £200,000 project will involve a 75kW lithium-ion battery system at an “eco-home project” in an undisclosed location.

“The average home uses around 1.5kW of electricity so the battery should provide power for around 50 homes in the development,” Andrew Jones, managing director for S&C Electric Europe, said. “The system can also control how you feed energy back to the grid. Without that control you would have to dig up the road and add cables to export the unused solar power.”

As energy storage costs (especially li-ion battery costs) drop, energy storage combined with increasingly cheap solar power becomes more and more attractive. I have the feeling this pilot project is the start of something big. Of course, S&C Electric is hopeful it is as well, but it is also pushing for increased policy support for energy storage to push this possibility forward.

“One of the challenges for energy storage is there are not the clear market signals for firms to invest in the technology and bring the costs down…. There needs to be a signal from policymakers to show storage firms the market will be there if they invest in bringing costs down.”

As we’ve written previously, there has been a push to get an energy storage act implemented in the U.S. If it were, the energy storage market would expand at a much faster rate and costs would come down more quickly (as they have for solar and wind power). However, as with anything energy related these days, grid lock in Congress is preventing anything good from happening at the moment.

Meanwhile, projects like the one above and like the new largest energy storage station in the world (a BYD project in China), keep the sector moving forward and keep providing us with optimistic news to pass on to you.

Image: solar panels & sun via Shutterstock

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Tags: community energy storage, energy storage solar, home energy storage, home solar energy storage, S&C, S&C Electric, solar energy storage, solar power energy storage

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

Sam

Yes that right 1kw is 1kwh, an appliance that draws 1kw over the hour is 1kwh.
Jim

Jonny5 is right; in Australia grid solar power has cause high main voltage to exceed 240v main AC power. Grid inverter has raised power voltage levels above 283vac & even higher than 300vac. Houses near by have suffered appliances damage, running hot and caused house fires as a direct cause of grid solar power. There is also legal action against the grid solar power homes that generated power back to the grid because of the voltage surges that solar power delivers to the grid.
- http://helioshirt.com/ Kyle Sager helioshirt.com
  
  Let me see if I get you straight. Johnny5 equates solar to grid damage. He doesn’t qualify the proclamation. He leads with it with everything but a big punctuation mark. He responds to an article about Chicago with Australia (which you back) While German residents justifiably lay claim to the largest, most brilliant and successful solar experiment in all human history; and they have no such problem. Maybe Australia’s situation’s unique. But that’s not what Johhny5 said. Johnny5 equated chicago to australia. The United States harbors nearly 4 times the population of Germany. So what’s really going on here? Fear mongering. Attempts to obfuscate – to cloud beautiful trails that have been blazed in places like Germany. I salute Germany. They did it all WITH LESS SUN. If we were real leaders we’d be matching their scale here. Bravo to S&C electric. I applaud you.
  - Kyle Sager helioshirt.com
    
    & btw…that’s a big point of storage…prevent damage.
http://www.joetaxpayer.com JoeTaxpayer

Has storage become cheap enough that it’s preferable to store (solar-produced) power than to push it to the grid?
I know for solar, the first tipping point is for it to pay for itself in the highest cost/highest return areas, but thought storage still had a ways to go. That installations were typically only for as-needed with little to push or store.
perfsolar

Energy storage will be in the near future. With 50% power produced from plants lost in transmission, it only makes sense for storage to be made available. This means we can use solar plants to produce at peak times and stored for future use. This will allow our power grid to be more modular and less dependent on a few main sources.

They may not have taken plants off line but no new plants have been built either. You will continue to hear this argument from coal and oil. Burn baby, Burn….
- Bill_Woods
  
  Transmission losses are more like 10%. Long-range, high-voltage transmission loses ~3% per 1000 km.
  - perfsolar
    
    Correct Bill, sorry meant 5%. But that 5% equates to billions lost annually. DC power when converted to AC only loses 1% due to inverter efficiency. Electric storage locally will be where its at.
    
    http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/
Captivation

In a sense we are all energy nomads who live hand to mouth / moment by moment, with no ability to store energy for future use. I saw this clearly in the blackout of 2003. One moment people had ample energy, while an instant later they would do almost anything for a few watts to power the lights, or the fridge, or the radio, or the elevator.

Its a bit like driving your car with the fuel gauge always close to empty. In the future it will be unthinkable to not have at least a day’s supply of energy stored in batteries. Even if there is a small cost attached to this, it will be compensated by the ability to purchase and store energy when prices get low. Many people do the same thing with groceries. Having a fridge is an investment. But that investment can be gradually paid off by the savings from the ability to store sale priced groceries longer. In the future living with battery power will be like living without a fridge.
Jonny5

solar power damage grid

Expert Warns: labor & liberal Australia Renewable Energy Transition ‘will fail’. Uncovering truth, new weather-dependent Energy now threatening to destabilize power grids all across Australia, Grid solar power supply is starting to wreak havoc on national power grid. After tens of billions of Australian dollars spent on renewable energy systems and higher prices for consumers, not a single coal or gas-fired power plant has been taken offline. Effort to stabilize the grid have spectacularly failed to work under the green clean energy future program while 2 NSW Energy providers which operates half the electricity network in New South Wales is checking its entire network for solar defect which has cause transformers to shut down and households appliances to be damage. Small house operator have failed to service there solar grid tied inverter system which is a breach of the power quality ACT, all found to have major defects under the audit. Under the Power Act NSW, QLD, A.C.T you must at all time monitor power which flows back to the grid, keep records of your equipment, data logging, and services records which none have done, clear breach of the power act
- No
  
  None taken offline (coal stations), but none added.
- ThomasGerke
  
  25 GW of solar capacity on the grid here in Germany… pumping up to 18 GW of capacity into the grid as of now (April). But the grid is stable. Addapting the low-voltage distribution grid is actually neccessary anyways & expanding it to be smart-grid ready is cheaper than building new power lines.
  
  If there are so many problems in Australia, it’s bad coordination at the level of the grid operators… are they independent or are they owned by the companies that own the coal power stations?
  - Bill_Woods
    
    Germany is part of a much larger region, with the capability of exporting several GW of surplus power. That’s not really an option for Australia.
    - ThomasGerke
      
      That’s a popular argument. But I do not think that it’s a valid point.
      1. Germany has not unlimited interconnection space with it’s neighbours.
      2. Germany is also made up of different regions and areas.
      In theory Germany could have 75-90 GW of PV Solar output at a given moment of the day and use it all by itself. So the limit isn’t nearly reached.
      
      The problem is that the existing power plants are not flexible enough to make space for solar quick enough and there isn’t enough local storage / grid capacity to make full use of solar power in a decentralized fashion.
      That’s not really a problem of PV solar, that’s a problem of the conventional power system being designed in an outdated 19th/20th century fashion. It has to change since it’s extremly inefficant and the main contributor to the water, climate and energy crisis of the world.
      
      And because many parts of the system are in dire need of replacement anyways (so change will happen, so we might as well make it a good change)
Bob

75kw is not enough power for 1 home, so how the hell are going to power up 50 homes 24/7 hour a day aweek, from one set of battery rated at 75kw.
- http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  you’re thinking kwh, not kw
  - Sam
    
    1kw is 1kwh; an appliance that draws 1kw over the hour is 1kwh. They is no defences 1kw is over time 60 min is 1kwh.
  - Mike
    
    What home uses 1.5kw so your talking about capping home to 1.5kw per hour over 50 house which is 1.5kw X 24 hour = 36kw, 36kw X 50(houses) = 1800kw per day over 50 house no battery can supply that power level from 75kw battery pack.
- http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  from Howard C. Hayden, Ph.D., professor emeritus of physics at the University of Connecticut and adjunct professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo:
  
  “From the standpoint of the power station, the utility needs to produce less than about 1.5 kilowatts per household.”
  
  ( http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_kilowatts_power_an_average_house#ixzz1t9yTJdcj )
Freealex1

kW versus kWh (kW-hours) are very different thing. Does the battery system hold 75 kWh? If so, that is not enough to power 50 homes for a day, but maybe for one hour?

This site needs to be more precise in units of measure, especially as these are basics of electricity production / consumption, and often serve to confuse readers more than inform.
- http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  no, not kWh, but kW (as stated).
  
  also, forgot to include the source in the article — just added that, but if you don’t want to scroll up, this is it: http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2168712/-electric-pilot-round-clock-solar-power
  
  And from Howard C. Hayden, Ph.D., professor emeritus of physics at the University of Connecticut and adjunct professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo:
  
  “From the standpoint of the power station, the utility needs to produce less than about 1.5 kilowatts per household.”
  
  ( http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_kilowatts_power_an_average_house#ixzz1t9yTJdcj )
  - Clement Cadisch
    
    As a mere measure for power, 1.5 kW has to be time-related in order to express a measure for energy — be it only by specifying that power has to be supplied at an average level of 1.5 kW in order to sustain a single household, whereby the time factor is “all the time, i. e. permanently”.
    
    Is there a symbol for ‘permanently’? Could it be rms (root mean square), i. e. 1.5 kWrms?).
    - http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
      
      yeah, i took that to mean, at any given time.