According to theInternational Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), nearly one-third of global energy generation comes from renewable sources – and the rate continues to climb every year. However, increasing our share of renewable energy generation can be fraught with challenges – especially when it comes to integrating these Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) with existing grid infrastructure.
One potential solution? The humble battery. Battery energy storage systems (BESS) allow utilities and other energy generators to capture excess energy and safely store it for future use. The effective use of BESS will be critical to the clean energy transition, the stabilization of the electrical grid and will continue to evolve to be a large part of the future energy system.
An ongoing super battery project in Denmark is a case study for using battery storage as a way to implement aggressive decarbonization strategies that work. Developed and installed by BattMan Energy with Hitachi Battery energy storage systems (BESS), the super battery is one technology for trying to fulfill the country’s climate change goals.
The gateway between the North and Baltic Seas, Denmark generates nearly 60% of its energy from wind – the highest rate among International Energy Agency (IEA) members. The combination of wind, bioenergy and solar drives the share of renewable energy generation up to 81% – allowing the country to nearly phase out coal power plants and meet its goal of ending fossil fuel production entirely by 2050.
While integration typically isn’t a problem for areas where renewables still represent a small share of total generation, countries that have been aggressive in their decarbonization strategies and are farther along their decarbonization maturity are finding it hard to flatten the production curve and maintain reliable service for customers – simply because a larger share of their energy generation is inconsistent.
Grid modernization helps, of course – providing visibility into and control over distributed assets spread across an increasingly decentralized grid. But all the optimization in the world can’t make up for the fact that solar panels don’t produce energy at night and wind turbines cease to spin when the weather is calm.
The fast, seamless integration of renewable energy generation into our electrical grids is crucial to meeting decarbonization and climate change goals around the world. BESS allows utilities to capture excess energy (when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing) and safely store it for future use (when the sun sets or the wind dies down). This helps enable a smooth transition to renewable energy, stabilizes grid performance and allows organizations to create new revenue opportunities by selling excess energy on the open market.
Knowing the impact battery storage could have on their decarbonization efforts, the Danish government tapped BattMan Energy to build three battery parks across the country in Toftland, Olstykke and Soro to handle excess production of wind, solar and biomass energy generation.
By the middle of 2025, the battery parks will be able to store 36 MW / 72 MWh of electricity at any time – the equivalent energy of powering 6,000 Danish households. BattMan has also begun development on a fourth battery park in Denmark – a BESS that will provide an additional 500 MW / 1.5 GWh of backup electricity to the national grid.
Transitioning to renewable energy generation is the only way the world is going to meet its decarbonization and climate goals before we cross the point of no return. But, seamless transition from dirty energy to renewables like solar and wind is going to be more difficult than anyone imagined.
As we have seen in Denmark, battery storage is central to the clean energy transition – providing a smooth path for the transition to renewable energy, stabilizing the national grid and providing additional revenue opportunities through the sale of excess electricity.
Pea sized stones heated to 600°C in large, insulated steel tanks are at the heart of a new innovation project aiming to make a breakthrough in the storage of intermittent wind and solar electricity.
The technology, which stores electrical energy as heat in stones, is called GridScale, and could become a cheap and efficient alternative to storing power from solar and wind in lithium-based batteries. While lithium batteries are only cost-effective for the supply of energy for short periods of up to four hours, a GridScale electricity storage system will cost effectively support electricity supply for longer periods – up to about a week.
"The only real challenge with establishing 100 per cent renewable electricity supply is that we can''t save the electricity generated during windy and sunny weather for use at a later time. Demand and production do not follow the same pattern. There are not yet commercial solutions to this problem, but we hope to be able to deliver this with our GridScale energy storage system," says Henrik Stiesdal, founder of the climate technology company Stiesdal Storage Technologies, which is behind the technology.
In brief, the GridScale technology is about heating and cooling basalt crushed to tiny, pea-sized stones in one or more sets of insulated steel tanks. The storage facility is charged through a system of compressors and turbines, which pumps heat energy from one or more storage tanks filled with cool stones to a similar number of storage tanks filled with hot stones, when there is surplus power from wind or the sun.
This means the stones in the cold tanks become very cold, while they become very hot in the hot tanks; in fact up to 600oC. The heat can be stored in the stones for many days, and the number of sets of stone-filled tanks can be varied, depending on the length of storage time required.
When there is demand for electricity again, the process reverses, so the stones in the hot tanks become colder while they become warmer in the cold tanks. The system is based on an inexpensive storage material and mature, well-known technology for charging and discharging.
"Basalt is a cheap and sustainable material that can store large amounts of energy in small spaces, and that can withstand countless charges and discharges of the storage facility. We are now developing a prototype for the storage technology to demonstrate the way forward in solving the problem of storing renewable energy – one of the biggest challenges to the development of sustainable energy worldwide," says Ole Alm, head of development at the energy group Andel, which is also part of the project.
The GridScale prototype will be the largest storage facility in the Danish electricity system, and a major challenge will be to make the storage flexibility available on the electricity markets in a way that provides the best possible value. Consequently, this will also be part of the project.
The precise location of the prototype storage facility has yet to be decided. However, it will definitely be in the eastern part of Denmark in south or west Zealand or on Lolland-Falster, where production from new large PV units in particular is growing faster than consumption can keep up.
The full name of the innovation project is ''GridScale – cost-effective large-scale electricity storage'', and it will run for three years with a total budget of DKK 35 million (EUR 4.7 million). The project is being funded with DKK 21 million (EUR 2.8 million) from the Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program (EUDP).
In addition to the companies Stiesdal and Andel, the partner group comprises Aarhus University (AU), the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Welcon, BWSC (Burmeister Wain Scandinavian Contractor), Energi Danmark and Energy Cluster Denmark.
The partners will provide an energy system analysis and design optimisation for a stone storage facility as well as optimize the technical concepts and mature the GridScale technology to a ready-to-market scalable solution.
For example, the European energy system model developed by AU will be combined with the model for optimising turbines developed by DTU to gain insight into the potential role of the stone storage facility in a European context and to optimise the design:
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