solar-plus-storage

Draft legislation has been introduced to the US House of Representative that would see energy storage receive the same investment tax credit as solar installations.

The ‘Energy Storage Tax Incentive and Deployment Act’, introduced by Pennsylvania representative Mike Doyle (pictured), would incentivise both utility-scale energy storage projects and small battery systems for residential use.

The current tax code allows an investment tax credit for energy storage when it is installed in conjunction with a solar energy system; this bill would extend the investment tax credit for energy storage investments in a wider range of applications and provide greater assurance to prospective investors.

The Hawaiian Public Utilities Commission has approved contracts for six solar-plus-storage projects, totalling 274MW/998MWh, as the price of power generated from such projects falls below traditional generation methods.

The approval comes as the cost of solar projects fully backed by four-hour batteries has fallen below the regulators’ threshold of US$0.10 per kWh, which the Commission said is “cheaper than both gas peaker plants and Hawaiian Electric Industries’ current cost of fossil fuel generation, much of which is petroleum based”.

This announcement comes less than 18 months after AES Distributed Energy started work on a 20MW/100MWh storage system on Kauai island, at which point the cost of power for solar-plus-storage stood at $0.11 per kWh.

Japan-based battery developer NGK Insulators has supplied sodium-sulfur (NaS) batteries for a pilot energy storage project in the United Arab Emirates.

The 1.2MW/7.2MWh batteries were supplied to Dubai’s Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) for the project at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park (MBRAMSP). Ingeteam provided power and control electronics for the battery storage facility.

The NaS system will be used for “energy time shifting, frequency control and voltage control”, as well as to increase grid stability and reduce CO₂ emissions. It will be “the first energy storage system paired with a solar PV plant at a grid-scale level in the United Arab Emirates”, the companies said.

ENGIE has started commercial operations of its 100MW Kathu Solar Park (KSP) to “provide clean and reliable energy to 179,000 homes” in South Africa.

KSP is a greenfield concentrated solar power project with “parabolic trough technology” and equipped with “a molten salt storage system that allows for 4.5 hours of thermal energy storage”.

The project has been realised under round 3.5 of South Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement (REIPPP) programme, a competitive tender process launched “to facilitate private sector investment in renewable energy generation”.

Chinese vanadium redox battery manufacturer VRB Energy has begun commissioning a 3MW/12MWH vanadium redox battery, phase one of its Hubei Zaoyang 10MW/40MWh project, which will be the “largest vanadium flow battery installed in China”.

The system is being installed to integrate a large solar photovoltaic system into the grid at Zaoyang.

VRB’s chief technical officer Dr Mianyan Huang said: “We are delighted to have successfully integrated the first module of a 1MW/4MWh VRB-ESS into the grid, allowing our customer, Hubei Pingfan, to immediately benefit from cost-savings on peak-hour electricity tariffs through energy arbitrage at its industrial park.”