Battery Metals

Revolt, a first-of-its-kind program that allows electric vehicle (EV) owners to further support the use of renewable energy, will continue through the end of 2018. When a member claims the upgrade, Great River Energy dedicates wind energy to completely cover the electricity used to fuel an EV for the car’s lifetime.

“Revolt takes the carbon calculations out of the picture for someone considering the environmental impact of driving an EV because it is fueled with 100% wind energy,” said David Ranallo, Revolt program manager. “The environmental impact of all electric vehicles will improve over time as emissions continue to decline on the electric grid.”

The program was implemented to build awareness around EVs in Minnesota. Sales of EVs have risen consistently in recent years, and charging infrastructure has grown significantly.

In 2017, additional charging stations installed between the Twin Cities and the North Shore have made the classic Minnesota road trip accessible to all EVs – even first generation versions with smaller ranges.

Two categories of EVs are eligible for enrollment in Revolt: plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) and plug-in hybrids (PHEV). PEVs are all electric, all of the time – no internal combustion engine or gas tank involved. PHEVs are the multi-taskers, running on both gas and electricity.

Early adopters of electric vehicles may have been motivated by environmental concerns, but a leading Nissan executive says the next generation of EV consumers are driven by the experience – and so marketing to them must emphasise fun, not function.

Vincent Wijnen, the company’s VP of Marketing and Sales in Asia, told Campaign Asia that marketers in the automotive sector need to focus on how much fun EVs are to drive and that this message resonates particularly strongly in Asia.

“That is the marketing angle. At the end of the day, the EV market will grow, but in the immediate term, for people who are buying EVs, the main driver is the excitement of driving that car without losing the excitement of driving,” he said. “People who drive EV for the first time are always amazed by the experience.”

Speaking partly to promote Nissan’s new zero emission Leaf marque, he explained that “the next generation of owners want the driving experience, and they don’t want to compromise”.

The offer of zero emissions is no longer what predominantly drives consumers to buy EVs anymore, he added, although he made clear that new technology, as found in the Nissan Leaf, also delivers marketing advantages.

“The technology, even if it doesn’t have huge potential today in the market, allows you to differentiate from a marketing perspective,” he said.

“It allows us to showcase the technologies in a vehicle like the Leaf. Even if you only sell a few, the storytelling allows us to link it back to other vehicles we have, and that’s going to help us from a marketing perspective.”

Wijnen said there is huge potential for the EV market in Asia, not least because cities in the region are continuing to grow with all the accompanying problems of congestion and traffic jams.

While EVs like the Leaf won’t put an end to congestion, he conceded, their advanced technology – such as the Leaf’s one-pedal drive system – could help to reduce traffic accidents.

“If you think about congestion and accept the fact that there will still be traffic jams – it will not solve that – then manual shift driving, or even automatic, is very tiring,” he said.

“Your attention span drops, and that’s when most accidents happen, small or large. With this new technology, you don’t have to worry about it.”

Tesla, fresh from the success of its newly-opened big battery in South Australia, has joined 18 other groups competing for the right to build another big battery, this time in the Northern Territory.

Expressions of interest for a big battery in the Darwin-Katherine network – with a nominal capacity of between 25MW and 45MW, and storage of 30 minutes and 1.5 hours – closed on Monday, with 19 companies responding.

Apart from Tesla, there was interest from Infigen Energy, Electranet, MPower, UGL, and Carnegie’s Energy Made Clean, along with New Zealand’s Vector (which is building a 5MW battery in Alice Springs), and international groups Kokam, Mitsui, and Alstom, among others listed here.

The government-owned utility Territory Generation wants the battery to provide contingency frequency control ancillary services (FCAS), reduce the required spinning reserve from its various gas and diesel generators, provide peak shaving and ultimately allow for more solar PV in the local grid.

Tesla has already built the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery in South Australia, located next to the Hornsdale wind farm, and will build a 20/34MWh battery next to the Bulgana wind project in Victoria that will provide electricity to a new Nectar Farms greenhouse.

Other battery storage projects are springing up across the country, at the Wattle Point wind farm, at the Lincoln Gap wind farm (both in South Australia), at the Lakeland solar and storage project, and numerous other solar and wind installations.

Tesla is also said to be a front-runner for a battery storage project near Cairns, with Hornsdale owner Neoen, that could be bigger than Hornsdale – but Neon’s Franck Woitiez says those plans are in the very early stages, and will depend on the roll-out of Queensland’s upcoming renewable energy auction.

Territory Generation, meanwhile, says it needs a battery because it is running some 40-50MW of “spinning reserve” in the case of an outage of one of its fleet of gas generators, and fears this need may increase as more solar is added to the grid over the medium term.

The grid in Darwin and Katherine has demand ranging from just below 100MW to nearly 300MW, with an average of around 195MW.

So far, it has little in the way of solar PV, with only 10 per cent of households with rooftop solar and just eight larger scale solar installations (more than 100kW) totalling 8.2MW.

This includes the 5.5MW Darwin installation, pictured above, but could soon be joined by 12.5MW of solar at two RAAF installations, and a 25MW solar plant proposed for Katherine by a group known as Katherine Solar.

Territory Generation also expects household solar penetration to nearly triple to 29 per cent by 2025, and appears to have a conservative view on the grid’s ability to handle it.

“The fluctuations and step changes in generation due to cloud cover has negligible effect on power system stability at this stage,” it says in its tender documents.

“However, with penetration levels increasing to in excess of 10 per cent of the total load issues with voltage and frequency regulation start to arise.

“It is therefore a requirement that an energy storage system with sufficient capacity can supply during these periods of large solar PV capacity loss where machine ramp up/down rates are not fast enough to respond.”

However, it also notes that the battery will not be required for shifting solar output, or smoothing solar output, in the short term.

The utility wants the battery storage array to reduce the need for spinning reserve by around half, and is open to various configurations – between 25MW and 45MW of nominal capacity – and at least 30 minutes of storage.

Proposals are due by August/September this year, with the battery due to be in service by the end of the 2018/2019 financial year.

Iran is pursuing plans to connect its power grid with European electrical systems, and Armenia, a nation of about 3 million people northwest of Iran, is seen as playing a key role in the linkup.

“By setting up a regional electricity grid and boosting current power exchanges, Iran can connect its network with Georgia, Turkey, Slovenia and other European states through Armenia,” Alireza Daemi, deputy energy minister for planning and economic affairs, was quoted as saying by IRNA on Wednesday.

To the south, Armenia shares borders with Iran. To the west and the north, it is surrounded by Turkey and Georgia, two countries lying at the intersection of Asia and Europe.

Armenia is connected to Iran through two electricity lines and a third is under construction. According to reports, the new power line, to be completed by the end of 2018 at an estimated cost of $107 million, is part of an agreement between Iran, Russia, Armenia and Georgia to synchronize their power grids by 2019, paving the way for electricity exchange between Tehran and Moscow as part of their cooperation plans.

Daemi added that Iranian companies are due to build one of the power lines in Armenia, which will reach Georgia.

On the Energy Ministry’s measures to increase electric exchanges with Turkmenistan, Daemi said bilateral power trade is being carried out through two 230-kV lines, which are being upgraded to 400-kV power lines to minimize low voltage and wastage. Iranian officials say power wastage in Iran’s national grid has witnessed a 4.5% reduction, receding from 15% to 10.68% in the last four years.

According to Daemi, Iran has power trade with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Nakhchivan, and exports electricity to Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

With an installed power production capacity of 77,000 MW, Iran meets almost 80% of its electricity demand from aging thermal plants. It is reported that steps have been taken to gradually convert the conventional plants into efficient combined-cycle units.

Close to 12,000 MW are produced from hydroelectric plants and 1,000 MW from the sole nuclear power plant in Bushehr in the south.

In 2018, we live in a world in which technology has spread into our lives in incremental and subtle ways. We probably don’t realize technology’s impact on our daily routines because it feels so necessary and natural. Indeed, technology has transformed nearly every aspect of our life — except one. The aging and inefficient power markets in the US are almost untouched by technology, and it’s become a real problem as the US anticipates new directions for energy production and distribution.

Through a combination of technological, social, economic, and policy trends, the power grid became what the National Academy of Engineers described as “the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century.” According to EIA’s Short Term Energy Outlook for Feb. 2017, US annual energy expenditures in 2016 were 5.4% of GDP, and US citizens paid over $1 trillion on energy that year.

Assessments of global innovation place the US in the lower end of the top 10 countriescurrently exploring energy expansion, as the US has been delayed by insufficient investment in energy R&D relative to the size of our economy. You see, the US spent only around $6.4 billion on energy R&D in FY 2016.

EIA expects annual retail sales of electricity to the residential sector in 2018 to be 2.9% higher than sales in 2017. Moreover, the forecast for total US consumption of electricity is expected to grow by 1.3% in 2018 and by 0.5% in 2019. The US retail electricity price for the residential sector averaged 12.8 cents/kWh in October 2017, with annual average residential electricity prices expected to increase by a further 2% in 2018 and 3% in 2019.

Our high-technology society demands electricity to power nearly all new products that come to market. Today’s grid has grown in complexity as historical patterns give way to emerging trends that reflect technological advances in how electricity is generated and consumed. Cleaner energy production and engaged, responsive energy consumers are starting to reshape the grid.

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, the cost of generating power from onshore wind fell by 23% between 2010 and 2017, and projects are now regularly being commissioned at a levelized cost of electricity of 4 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), with a global weighted average of around 6 cents/kWh.

And yet it’s still not enough. Average consumers have little in the way of information or sources to help them realize that they can power their residences and places of business with clean, reasonable renewable energy.

But why are green choices often more expensive, especially when it comes to energy, when the underlying costs can be lower? Drift* is a company that wants to change this. Drift partners directly with power makers, working with them to reduce their production costs. When they save money, you save money, and you also get access directly to clean energy, which means zero-emissions energy costs for you.

Reforming the Energy Industry

New York has implemented the Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) comprehensive energy strategy, which helps consumers make more informed energy choices, develop new energy products and services, and protect the environment while creating new jobs and economic opportunity throughout the state. Drift supports these goals of putting more clean energy on the grid.

“We were inspired by REV in New York, rather than going to Boston or Chicago first. You start to see a group of regulators who understand the market and what the future opportunities are,” Drift Founder Greg Robinson says.

Historically, power flowed instantaneously from generators across a vast network of transmission and distribution lines before reaching consumers, who used it for home lighting, office electronics, and powering subway systems that move millions through New York City.

While the traditional power providers make more money when their customers use more power, Drift doesn’t. Customers pay a fee and, in return, Drift gets them access to the best energy prices in the market. Drift is a company that doesn’t ever want to be at odds with their customers.

“We are completely incentivized to lower the cost of energy,” Robinson says. “We want to find more local sources, more efficiencies, and strip out the middle person. We don’t lose money if your power bill goes down. But we probably won’t sign up many people if your bill goes up.”