The new face of energy storage, the eCAMION community energy storage project. Photo: eCAMION.
Innovative energy storage solutions already being integrated into existing grids
By Duncan Kinney
People all over the world are beavering away, trying to find an answer to a $10 billion question. How do you design cheap and reliable energy storage for the grid?
Due to the intermittent nature of solar and wind power, energy storage is key to integrating more and more renewables onto the grid. And the trend is clear – prices for renewable energy technology are dropping and more and more policy is coming online that encourages renewable energy development. Grid operators need stability and they’re willing to pay. Lux Research just released a report, which finds that grid storage demand will expand to $10.4 billion by 2017.
Cam Carver is the CEO of Temporal Power, an energy storage startup based in Mississauga, Ontario. Photo: Troy Media.
In Canada, many entrepreneurs are working on figuring out energy storage. Cam Carver is the CEO of Temporal Power, an energy storage startup based in Mississauga, Ontario. It’s taking an idea that Da Vinci himself worked on, the flywheel, and scaling it up for commercial use.
“A flywheel is essentially a mechanical battery that stores kinetic energy, and what we’re doing is we’re storing energy in a very heavy, fast-spinning wheel of solid steel,” says Carver.
Cam Carver is CEO of Temporal Power
It sounds complicated, but think of a flywheel like a game of tether-ball (thanks to Cleantechnica for the analogy). In tether-ball, you infrequently provide large bursts of energy to swing the rope and the ball around the pole. The weight of the rope and ball combine to even out the bursts of energy, giving it a relatively constant motion around the pole. But the rope stores energy as well, and after it fully wraps around the pole the ball reverses its direction at a relatively steady pace without any further energy input from the players.
When the sun is out or the wind is blowing, the flywheel is spinning up, charging the battery so to speak. When energy is needed it slows down releasing the stored up kinetic energy.
The original version of the Temporal Power flywheel was a small table-top version. Photo: Troy Media.
The flywheel at Temporal is a seven-foot tall and 9,000-pounds of solid steel that is suspended by magnets in a vacuum to reduce friction. It can store the equivalent of 50 kilowatt hours of electricity.
Temporal is also working on two pilot projects, one to counterbalance short-term voltage variations, the other is a five megawatt storage plant that will go in near Tillsonburg, an area rife with wind development.
“This is part of the magic pill. This helps solve a very important and immediate part of the problem,” says Carver.
The original version of the Temporal Power flywheel was a small table-top version
The next company we tracked down in the energy storage space features a product that the great majority of us carry around every day – a lithium-ion battery.
The company is called eCAMION and the project we checked out is called Community Energy Storage. It’s a giant lithium-ion battery with 1,700 separate cells and enough juice to keep a modest sized neighborhood running for a couple of hours. It’s tucked in a non-descript green box near a community centre in North York in Ontario.
eCAMION President Carmine Pizzuro. Photo: Troy Media.
eCAMION President Carmine Pizzuro describes it as a shock absorber for the electricity grid.
“It’s an excellent way to make your grid more efficient. Not only does it peak shave, but because it’s coupled with renewables it’s a more efficient use of electricity on the grid,” says Pizzuro.
Peak shaving, valley filling, load shifting. This isn’t the latest in technology from Gillette: these are real, day-to-day concerns for grid operators and it ultimately affects how much your electricity bill ends up costing you.
Projects like this mitigate the need to run expensive peaker plants while also improving power quality and helping make existing grid assets long longer.
This is the first time the idea has been tested on a grid-scale in Canada, which was partly why the $16 million project received a $5 million grant from Sustainable Development Technology Canada. The initial Community Energy Storage project was commissioned earlier in 2013 and two more will be built.
These were just the two energy storage companies we visited but projects like these happening everywhere. Different flywheels aregetting built. Battery storage technology is being integrated into projects around the world such as a five megawatt project near Portland, Oregon. Companies are developing large batteries to go with wind turbines or going even bigger and attaching a large battery farm to a large wind project.
As project after project succeeds or fails, the level of knowledge will increase and the engineering culture at the utilities and grid operators will gradually shift. There are clever, ambitious people out there doing exciting things and, with a $10 billion dollar prize, you can rest assured that someone will figure it out.
Troy Media columnist Duncan Kinney is editor and production manager of Green Energy Futures, a multi-media series presented atwww.greenenergyfutures.ca. The series is supported by Suncor Energy, TD, Shell Canada and the Pembina Institute. He is taking over The Green Revolution while David Dodge runs for City Council in Edmonton. Go get ‘em Dave!
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