Energy Storage Contest Begins: $5M Prize in 2013

You may have heard about General Electric’s “Ecomagination” challenge contest, where General Electric Co. will invest $10 billion in environmentally friendly products by 2015. Or the X PRIZE, a $10 million+ award given to the first team to achieve a specific goal, set by the X PRIZE Foundation, which has the potential to benefit humanity.

Now there’s a new contest in the Energy Storage area. Energy Storage Challenge in 2011 will run over three years, in thee stages, with an ultimate prize of $5 million. “We have already had 160 organizations and individuals pre-apply to the 2011 Challenge,” notes London-based Jonathan Slater, Director of the Energy Storage Challenge effort.

The first round, called the “Fundamental Ideas Challenge” will focus on original ideas for the future of transportable energy storage. The prize fund for the best idea is US$250,000, granted for the individual or organization to take their idea and try to make it a reality. “Organizations involved with the challenge will benefit from invaluable exposure and will have access to review of all the ideas submitted,” Slater said.

This first chalelnge is looking for fresh ideas about systems that can provide transportable energy storage. Proposals must be notably different from existing systems and in this case, an idea is really all that's needed. Finalists will have the honor of presenting their ideas before sponsors, investors, peers and a panel of independent judges at the first ever Energy Storage Summit in September 2011 (details TBD). This Challenge will open for entrants on 1 January 2011 and will close 1 June 2011. The winner will receive a prize fund of $250,000, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Office of Naval Research - Global (ONR-G).

The Lab Demonstration Challenge is seeking systems that can plausibly be implemented within 2-5 years. Systems can still be bench based and may be not completely developed. However, their potential must be evident. As with the previous year, finalists will present their prototypes at the Energy Storage Summit in September 2012. This Challenge will open for entrants on 1 January 2012 and will close 1 June 2012. The winner will receive a prize fund of $1 million.

In the final year on "Transportable Energy Storage", entrants must submit a system that is ready for demonstration as systems will be put to the test in real world situations. Finalists will compete against each other at the Energy Storage Summit in September 2013. This Challenge will open for entrants on 1 January 2013 and will close 1 June 2013. The winner will receive a prize fund of $5 million. This Challenge is not yet open for entrants, but it will be soon, according to the website.

Slater said there are a number of different ways to be involved in the challenge, from sponsorship packages starting at $5,000, to being part of the judging and advisory panel. “There are limited sponsorship places and we limit the number of organizations in each sector who can sponsor the Challenge,” he said.

Current sponsors and partners are Electricity Storage Association, University of Maryland, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Thales, USIBC, ONR and ONRG .

$4B 1GW NaS Energy Storage Project Goes to Mexico

Mexico President Calderon announced today at COP16/CMP6, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, his intention to support a project by Rubenius, a Dubai-based alternative energy and smart grid enabler, to provide energy storage to enable use of renewable energy and manage the power grid more efficiently.

“Energy storage is the intelligent way to make renewable energy carbon free. Currently renewables require some sort of backup power -- for example: when the wind stops blowing, the most common solution today is carbon based backup systems. Energy storage can end this quandary,” stated President Calderon.

The President met with Claus Rubenius, chairman of Rubenius, at COP16/CMP6. The two had an in-depth discussion of renewable storage in North America and other locations.

“It is only fitting that we set a timetable for eliminating barriers to enable Mexico and our neighboring countries to accelerate renewable energy efforts at COP16/CMP6,” said President Calderon.

Rubenius bought 140 hectares (346 acres) of land in Baja California, Mexico, and will install 1,000 MWs (1GW) of sodium sulphide (NaS) energy storage batteries -- at a cost of over $4 billion. Rubenius will offer the storage space to energy firms and utilities in both countries, making deployment of wind and solar energy more viable.
The site, at the border of Mexico and San Diego, is the Silicon Border science park. It was developed for manufacturing high tech products in Mexicali, Mexico, and picked for its existing infrastructure and close proximity to both the Baja California power grid and parts of the US grid, including the new Sunrise Power Grid expansion. Silicon Border caters to the needs of the renewable energy sector, including smart grid, wind and solar firms looking for factory sites and energy generation sites.

In addition to the energy storage site and future manufacturing in Mexico, Rubenius will establish an R&D center in San Diego, and it will include labs for smart grid products and services.

Rubenius, the recently created parent of Amplex, incorporated in Denmark in 2001. In the UAE, the Amplex Group has installed what the firm called the largest energy storage system in the world.

In addition to the world’s first energy warehouse, today Rubenius also announced his intentions to pursue energy storage manufacturing operations. The new factory will also be based in Silicon Border; Baja California creating an additional 1,000 green jobs there.

Rubenius said it will also offer its products and expertise for off grid Communities. Nearly 3.5 billion people do not have access to a reliable electrical grid and clean water. Mexico will initiate several beta sites where off-grid communities are provided with either solar or wind power, power storage and water treatment at rates near what people on the grid are paying in the long run. Runebius has solutions now; President Calderon expressed interest in trying this technology in one or two communities.

“Our experience in the UAE and our smart grid expertise has given us the confidence to enter into the North American market with a 1 GW energy storage project in Silicon Border’s science park in Mexicali, Baja California,” said Rubenius. “The Mexican operation will house the storage devices and we will have offices in San Diego, California for research and development. The locations enable us to address both Mexico and the U.S.” The storage warehouse will require an investment of more than $4 billion, over the next 5 to 7 years.

Altairnano Wins 10MW Lithium-Titanate Battery Project

Reno-based Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (Altairnano) (NASDAQ: ALTI) (NASDAQ: ALTID), has been selected by Inversiones Energéticas, S.A. de C.V. (INE), one of El Salvador's largest electric utilities, to provide a turn-key 10 MW lithium-titanate based battery system, dubbed "ALTI-ESS," for frequency control.

Under the proposed agreement, Altairnano will have responsibility for site preparation, system installation, training, final testing and commissioning of the total solution. The system will be located at INE's Talnique power station site.

"Altairnano's ALTI-ESS advanced battery system provides an economical solution for managing voltage and frequency fluctuations, because of its ability to rapidly absorb energy from the grid, and just as quickly discharge energy back into the grid," stated Terry Copeland, Altairnano President and Chief Executive Officer.

According to Altairnano, the nano-structured lithium titanate in the cell of the battery produces distinctive performance attributes, including extremely fast charge and discharge rates, the high round-trip efficiencies, long cycle life, safety, and ability to operate under diverse environmental and extreme temperature conditions.
Altairnano’s lithium titanate technology is also unique because it lacks a solid electrolyte interface (SEI), as shown. The SEI is a “film” on the anode that is an internal resistor that limits power output and generates heat build-up in a standard lithium-ion battery. Therefore, the lack of an SEI allows the lithium titanate battery to work efficiently in extreme temperatures and significantly reduces thermal runaway risk. In short, by removing the highly reactive graphite from the system design, and instead using nano-structured lithium titanate materials as the negative electrode material, no significant interaction takes place with the electrolyte.

The battery’s operating temperature range also is wider than that of other technologies: from -40°C to 55°C (-40°F to 131°F). This capability virtually eliminates the need for supplemental heating when the battery is used in low temperature environments and reduces or eliminates cooling requirements for high temperature operation.

Conventional lithium ion batteries can typically be charged about 1,000 times before they are considered no longer useful. In laboratory testing, the Altairnano energy storage and battery systems have achieved over 25,000 charge and discharge cycles at rates up to 40 times greater than common batteries, and still retain up to 80% of initial charge capacity.

Altairnano also claims its energy storage and battery systems deliver power per unit weight and unit volume several times greater than conventional lithium-ion batteries. Cell measurements performed with high power cell designs indicate specific power as high 4000 W/Kg and power density over 7,500 W/litre. By using nano-structured lithium titanate as the negative electrode material, the formation of an SEI, an electrochemical property that impedes the removal of lithium, which is the first step in power production, is eliminated.

Energy Storage in Fuel Cells Focus of HARP Project

BC Hydro is testing what could be the most viable method for storing large amounts of power at its Clayton Falls hydroelectric plant in Bella Coola, about 248 miles north of Vancouver, reports Russell Ray, senior associate editor of Hydro Review magazine (a PennWell property).

The run-of-river plant is now capable of using its surplus electricity to produce and store hydrogen through electrolysis. The hydrogen can then be used in a 120-kilowatt fuel cell to generate electricity when demand peaks.

This new source of emission-free power is replacing the need for power made from diesel-fueled generators. Bella Coola is not connected to BC Hydro’s grid and powered only by diesel generators and by a run-of-river facility which, while clean, was not capable of storing energy -- until now.

BC Hydro estimates the demonstration project known as the Hydrogen Assisted Renewable Power system (HARP) will lower the community’s diesel consumption by 200,000 liters a year and lower greenhouse gas emissions by 600 tons a year. BC Hydro reports to the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources. It is the third largest electric utility in Canada and serves customers in an area containing over 94 per cent of British Columbia's population.

“It’s a very cost-effective and convenient way to store renewable energy,” said David Field, a spokesman for BC Citizens for Green Energy. “It’s better than importing coal-fired electricity from Alberta and the U.S. to accomplish the same thing, which is what we’re doing right now.”

The Hydrogen Assisted Renewable Power (HARP) project is a partnership between BC Hydro, GE and Powertech and is supported by the Province of B.C. and Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC).

It was announced earlier that Ballard Power Systems (TSX:BLD)(NASDAQ:BLDP), was partnering with Dantherm Power A/S, a leading global manufacturer of fuel cell systems to provide BC Hydro, through its wholly owned subsidiary Powertech Labs Inc., with a 100 kW supplemental power product for deployment in Bella Coola. Ballard is supplying 60 units of its Mark1020 ACS fuel cell product, each sized to deliver 2kW's of gross power, together with technical support services.

Watch video interviews with Ballard's Chris Guzy, Chief Technology Officer and Michael Goldstein, Chief Customer Officer, discussing the history of fuel cells and how fuel cell products are playing an important role in the clean energy space.

Can "Electrofuels" be a Source of Green Energy Storage?

I'm happy to report that my feature article "Energy Storage and The Grid" is out in the new edition of Renewable Energy World North America edition (click here to download a PDF of the issue). You may have already seen most of the article, which was the basis of my first blog post "Energy Storage: The Basics."

What you didn't see, since I added it as the issue was going to print, was an interesting concept: green fuels. This concept was first presented to me during a trip through upstate NY, visiting a number of universities, including Cornell. In one cleantech approach, Emmanuel Giannelis, co-director of Cornell’s KAUST Center for Energy and Sustainability, says CO₂ sequestration – made possible with nanoparticle ionic materials – could be combined with a solar photocatalysis process. “People are focused on systems where you can split water into hydrogen and oxygen and combine the hydrogen with sequestered CO₂ to make methane or methanol. You can then store and use that just like gasoline or other fuels,” he said.



While I had not considered gasoline and other fuels, such as methane or butane, as a form of energy storage when setting out to create this blog, they are of course the most commonly used forms of energy storage. I won't be covering them much (if at all) moving forward, but it is interesting to think that they could be produced in a "green" fasion (i.e., without petrochemicals or biomass). I subsequently learned that this approach is actually the focus of an ARPA-E program called "Electrofuels." Most of the methods currently under development involve converting biomass or waste, while there are also approaches to directly produce liquid transportation fuels from sunlight and carbon dioxide. Although photosynthetic routes show promise, overall efficiencies remain low. "The objective of this topic is to develop an entirely new paradigm for the production of liquid fuels that could overcome the challenges associated with current technologies," notes the ARPA-E site. ARPA-E is looking for technologies that can use metabolic engineering and synthetic biological approaches for the efficient conversion of carbon dioxide to liquid transportation fuels. ARPA-E specifically seeks the development of organisms capable of extracting energy from hydrogen, from reduced earth-abundant metal ions, from robust, inexpensive, readily available organic redox active species, or directly from electric current. Theoretically such an approach could be 10 times more efficient than current photosynthetic-biomass approaches to liquid fuel production.

In one example, researchers from Columbia University will use the chemolithoautotrophic ammonia-oxidizing bacteria N. europaea to produce isobutanol from carbon dioxide. The team will genetically engineer the microorganism to demonstrate that they can efficiently reduce ammonia that can be generated electrochemically from nitrite, or supplied from waste water streams.

Using the energy of the sun or bacteria to create clean (or "cleanish" anyway) energy that also reduces CO₂? It could happen.

Li-ion microbatteries could get boost from nanostructured electrodes

A team of researchers at the University of Maryland is working to harness and exploit the "self-renewing" and "self-assembling" properties of viruses for a higher purpose: to build a new generation of small, powerful and highly efficient batteries and fuel cells.

The rigid, rod-shaped Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) is a well-known and widespread plant virus that devastates tobacco, tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetation. But in the lab, engineers have discovered that they can harness the characteristics of TMV to build components for the lithium ion batteries of the future. Genetically modifying the virus to display multiple metal binding sites allows for electroless nickel deposition and self-assembly of these nanostructures onto gold surfaces.

Caption: SEM image of Ni/TiO₂ nanocomposite electrode (top), cross-section TEM image of an individual nanorod showing the core/shell nanostructure (Credit: University of Maryland, College Park).

They can modify the TMV rods to bind perpendicularly to the metallic surface of a battery electrode and arrange the rods in intricate and orderly patterns on the electrode. Then, they coat the rods with a conductive thin film that acts as a current collector and finally the battery's active material that participates in the electrochemical reactions.

As a result, the researchers, brought together by Professor Reza Ghodssi, can greatly increase the electrode surface area and its capacity to store energy and enable fast charge/discharge times. TMV becomes inert during the manufacturing process; the resulting batteries do not transmit the virus. The new batteries, however, have up to a 10-fold increase in energy capacity over a standard lithium ion battery.

"The resulting batteries are a leap forward in many ways and will be ideal for use not only in small electronic devices but in novel applications that have been limited so far by the size of the required battery," said Ghodssi, director of the Institute for Systems Research and Herbert Rabin Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Clark School. "The technology that we have developed can be used to produce energy storage devices for integrated microsystems such as wireless sensors networks. These systems have to be really small in size—millimeter or sub-millimeter—so that they can be deployed in large numbers in remote environments for applications like homeland security, agriculture, environmental monitoring and more; to power these devices, equally small batteries are required, without compromising in performance."

TMV's nanostructure is the ideal size and shape to use as a template for building battery electrodes. Its self-replicating and self-assembling biological properties produce structures that are both intricate and orderly, which increases the power and storage capacity of the batteries that incorporate them. Because TMV can be programmed to bind directly to metal, the resulting components are lighter, stronger and less expensive than conventional parts.

Three distinct steps are involved in producing a TMV-based battery: modifying, propagating and preparing the TMV; processing the TMV to grow nanorods on a metal plate; and incorporating the nanorod-coated plates into finished batteries.

Specfically, the researchers integrated the TMV deposition and coating process into standard MEMS fabrication techniques as well as characterizing nickel–zinc microbatteries based on this technology. Using a microfluidic packaging scheme, devices with and without TMV structures have been characterized. The TMV modified devices demonstrated charge–discharge operation up to 30 cycles reaching a capacity of 4.45 µAh cm−2 and exhibited a six-fold increase in capacity during the initial cycle compared to planar electrode geometries. The effect of the electrode gap has been investigated, and a two-fold increase in capacity is observed for an approximately equivalent decrease in electrode spacing.



James Culver, a member of the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology and a professor in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, and researcher Adam Brown had already developed genetic modifications to the TMV that enable it to be chemically coated with conductive metals. For this project they extract enough of the customized virus from just a few tobacco plants grown in the lab to synthesize hundreds of battery electrodes. The extracted TMV is then ready for the next step.

Scientists produce a forest of vertically aligned virus rods using a process developed by Culver's former Ph.D. student, Elizabeth Royston. A solution of TMV is applied to a metal electrode plate. The genetic modifications program one end of the rod shaped virus to attach to the plate. Next these viral forests are chemically coated with a conductive metal, mainly nickel. Other than its structure, no trace of the virus is present in the finished product, which cannot transmit a virus to either plants or animals. This process is patent-pending.

Ghodssi, materials science Ph.D. student Konstantinos Gerasopoulos, and former postdoctoral associate Matthew McCarthy (now a faculty member at Drexel University) have used this metal-coating technique to fabricate alkaline batteries with common techniques from the semiconductor industry such as photolithography and thin film deposition.

While the first generation of their devices used the nickel-coated viruses for the electrodes, work published earlier this year investigated the feasibility of structuring electrodes with the active material deposited on top of each nickel-coated nanorod, forming a core/shell nanocomposite where every TMV particle contains a conductive metal core and an active material shell. In collaboration with Chunsheng Wang, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and his Ph.D. student Xilin Chen, the researchers have developed several techniques to form nanocomposites of silicon and titanium dioxide on the metalized TMV template. This architecture both stabilizes the fragile, active material coating and provides it with a direct connection to the battery electrode.

In the third and final step, Chen and Gerasopoulos assemble these electrodes into the experimental high-capacity lithium-ion batteries. Their capacity can be several times higher than that of bulk materials and in the case of silicon, higher than that of current commercial batteries.

"Virus-enabled nanorod structures are tailor-made for increasing the amount of energy batteries can store. They confer an order of magnitude increase in surface area, stabilize the assembled materials and increase conductivity, resulting in up to a10-fold increase in the energy capacity over a standard lithium ion battery," Wang said.

A bonus: since the TMV binds metal directly onto the conductive surface as the structures are formed, no other binding or conducting agents are needed as in the traditional ink-casting technologies that are used for electrode fabrication.

"Our method is unique in that it involves direct fabrication of the electrode onto the current collector; this makes the battery's power higher, and its cycle life longer," said Wang.

The use of the TMV virus in fabricating batteries can be scaled up to meet industrial production needs. "The process is simple, inexpensive, and renewable," Culver adds. "On average, one acre of tobacco can produce approximately 2,100 pounds of leaf tissue, yielding approximately one pound of TMV per pound of infected leaves," he explains.

At the same time, very tiny microbatteries can be produced using this technology. "Our electrode synthesis technique, the high surface area of the TMV and the capability to pattern these materials using processes compatible with microfabrication enable the development of such miniaturized batteries," Gerasopoulos adds.

While the focus of this research team has long been on energy storage, the structural versatility of the TMV template allows its use in a variety of exciting applications. "This combination of bottom-up biological self-assembly and top-down manufacturing is not limited to battery development only," Ghodssi said. "One of our lab's ongoing projects is aiming at the development of explosive detection sensors using versions of the TMV that bind TNT selectively, increasing the sensitivity of the sensor. In parallel, we are collaborating with our colleagues at Drexel and MIT to construct surfaces that resemble the structure of plant leaves. These biomimetic structures can be used for basic scientific studies as well as the development of novel water-repellent surfaces and micro/nano scale heat pipes."

Funding for the research comes from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences, the Maryland Technology Development Corporation, and the Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland. James Culver's work is conducted in collaboration with Purdue University professor Michael Harris.

CAES ADELE Demo Plant to Locate in Staßfurt

Construction on a compressed-air energy storage (CAES) project named ADELE will begin in 2013 in Staßfurt, a city in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany (ADELE stands for the German acronym for adiabatic compressed air energy storage for electricity supply). The project is a joint effort between RWE, General Electric, Zueblin, and the German Aerospace Center. The German Federal Ministry of Economics is also providing state funding. Altogether, the project members will contribute an amount of EUR 10 million ($USD 13.2 million). Like pumped-hydro and NaS batteries, CAES is seen as a way to store large amounts of energy. The project was announced earlier this year, but a location and not yet been determined.

With CAES, air is compressed during periods when electricity supply exceeds the demand; the resulting heat will be buffered in a thermal energy storage, and air will be pressed into underground caverns. When electricity demand increases later on, this compressed air can then be used to generate power in a turbine.


The demo plant will have a storage capacity of one billion watt-hours (GWh) and generate electrical power of up to 200 megawatt. That way ADELE will be able to provide backup capacity within a very short time and replace forty state-of-the-art wind turbines for a period of five hours.

According to a press release, during the compression process, the temperature of the air will play a decisive role since it rises to more than 600°C – thus making high demands on the compressor technology. GE is producing a preliminary aerodynamic design and the preliminary mechanical compressor design. To ensure that the resulting heat will not be lost, it will be extracted from the compressed air, before the air is stored, and absorbed by thermal energy storage. The heat storage facilities are up to 40m high containers with beds of stones or ceramic bricks through which the hot air flows. As soon as power is to be generated and before the air will be able to drive a turbine, the cold, compressed air must be heated again by the thermal energy storage. This adiabatic approach whereby the heat of the compressed air is not lost but remains in the process and can be used for power generation differs from existing compressed-air reservoirs primarily by its significantly higher levels of efficiency. Furthermore, the compressed air will not be heated by means of natural gas – thus avoiding CO₂ emissions.

"The development of a powerful heat accumulator featuring a very high internal pressure and an operating temperature of more than 600 degree Celsius confronts us with completely new challenges with respect to the design of the pressure chamber and the development of suitable storage materials," explained Joern Beckmann, Chief Executive Officer of Zueblin. "Such a task can only be solved by a breakthrough innovation because the thermal energy storage will be subject to stresses resulting from the cyclic temperature and pressure loads, which are much higher than usual",

Prof. Dr. Johann-Dietrich Woerner, Chairman of the Board of DLR, added: "Within the framework of the ADELE project, we will develop solutions for the conception, design, layout, and dimensioning of storage equipment and high-temperature insulation, which are core components and of decisive importance for the performance and cost efficiency of the overall structure."

Suitable locations for compressed-air storage power plants are, in particular, regions with adequate geological salt structures, which can then be used to build underground caverns for the absorption of large quantities of compressed air. In addition, such salt structures should be close to wind turbines. Staßfurt is such a location.

Concerning the selection of the location, Erdgasspeicher Kalle GmbH, a subsidiary of the RWE group, will contribute its know-how for the planning, installation, and operation of underground storage facilities.

General Electric‘s engineers are working to adapt turbine technology to meet the special requirements of the adiabatic CAES power plant. The pressures to be expected, for example, far exceed the inlet pressures of today‘s gas turbines. Moreover, the turbine must cope with the considerable fluctuations in pressures and throughput amounts when the storage facility is discharged.

Caption: Staßfurt, Germany, which is about halfway between Berlin and Hannover.