pv magazine interviewed Panasonic as part of our series of profiles on the recent surge of new storage companies and new storage products.
All data points suggest we’re on the cusp of massive growth in energy storage.
- The total energy storage market is expected to grow to $546 billion in annual revenue by 2035, according to a report released by Lux Research.
- The California residential battery market is going to explode this year, according to BNEF, which expects 50,000 residential battery systems to be installed his year — up from the 19,000 California homes that had batteries in 2019.
- There are several gigawatts worth of large-scale energy storage on utility integrated resource plans. The energy storage market is expected to surge tenfold from 2018 to 2023, rising to $5 billion annually, according to Wood Mackenzie.
Panasonic’s EverVolt residential battery went into production this year, after some time in beta testing.
The residential energy system comes in two sizes: 11.4 kilowatt-hours and 17.1 kilowatt-hours, depending on how many of the 55-pound battery packs are incorporated into the field-serviceable housing. These systems are intended for indoor usage.
The units are available in DC-coupled or AC-coupled versions and so can be retrofitted to an existing solar system if the situation demands.
When it comes to a system that combines solar and storage, Panasonic is one of the few vendors that builds both the silicon solar cells (based on Panasonic’s HIT technology) as well as the NMC batteries.
When asked about the seeming commodification of energy storage products, Daniel Glaser, senior sales engineer at Panasonic told pv magazine, “Brand is powerful — after a house and a car, a PV/storage system worth tens of thousands of dollars is one of the larger purchases a family will make.”
So — factors such as Panasonic’s longevity as a company or its ten-year warranty might be the reasons for purchasing a system, suggested Glaser, rather than some technical spec.
Glaser said that “eventually solar-plus-storage will be like air conditioning or HVAC” — but for now it’s an “emotional sale” in light of utility shut-offs and the threat of global warming.
Some of the energy storage companies we’ve covered recently:
- We covered Yotta Energy’s distributed batteries mounted under modules last week.
- SolPad gave pv magazine an update on its distributed storage and solar product.
- KiloVault’s 7.5-kW-hr wall-mount energy storage unit for residential and commercial applications is based on a lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) battery chemistry. The 7.5 kw-hr unit sells for $4,995 at the Alternative Energy Store and weighs 207 pounds.
- Kore Power’s 110 kw-hr rack-mounted battery system is intended for front-of-the-meter, multi-megawatt application. The 18-employee company’s management has roots in mining as well as a partnership with DFD, a supplier of anode, cathode and electrolyte materials to customers such as CATL, BYD, Tesla and Panasonic.
- NeoVolta’s 24 kw-hr residential storage entry, according to the CEO, has met the Tesla price, while giving better performance — he quoted the company’s 8.4 kW unit at $18,500 fully installed.
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The public is realizing that their local electric utility is NOT as affordable as a simple $0.12 to $0.16/kWh of electricity used. Programs supposedly designed to create a “market” that shifts time of use, when one uses the bulk of electricity rewards those who are “flexible” in their energy use each day. Yeah, not gonna’ happen. Folks are still the 9:00 to 5:00 crowd, the very job they do requires their ‘attendance’ at work on a regular schedule. So, all of these “rate shifting plans” are, is the usury of the work-a-day individual’s real world schedule to create the revenue stream the utility has enjoyed for decades. Smart energy storage allows one to buy electricity low, store personal generation and shift the time of use till one has the time to DO their chores that require electricity use. The utilities have “used” the solar PV movement as an excuse to shift their generation schedule to just when solar PV generation rolls off during the day into to early evening hours, when people are getting home and settling in for the night. Around 3 PM to around 9 or 10 PM each day TOU rate spiking programs have become popular money makers for these electric utilities. In some instances such as hot summer days, demand charges created by a surge of air conditioning use on the grid has spot generation market pricing in the $1,000/MWh market price. This, spiked rate use period will (hopefully) not last long, but one can see in this instance paying $10/kWh for an hour or two a (day) for just a few days will make one’s monthly electric bill untenable and extreme.
The bottom line, is the ratepayer has many more variables in the ROI of a solar PV system with or without energy storage. Coupling the two technologies with smart energy algorithms can be individually “programed” to meet that ratepayers energy use profile each day. Doing this for a couple of decades will pay for the solar PV plus energy storage sooner or later. It is a marathon, not a 50 yard dash.
Thank you for exposing the obvious that has transpired since the Edison Institute published it’s white paper on disruptive technologies.
I have watched the development of this democratic form of power generation since Mother Earth offered it’s window heat box to the world.
Today investment capital is abandoning stranded assets and promoting the 21st century residential option of consumer choice in residential power production, transmission, and investment.
Your comment on time of use and the fact no one gets up two in the morning to get the kids off to school and go to work is very pertinent to this wealth building issue for the American public until we see what the levelized cost of electricity is in the U.S.
It’s time the ratepayer is part of this energy party and investment opportunity.
Why not use V2H with Nissan Leaf to store and release energy as needed? 40-62kWh at your service.
Seems a no brainer. I have a hard time imagining that the electric car will not be huge as an energy storage system in the fairly near future. The issue though, might be managing battery degradation.
PNM IRP 2017 engineers solar problem focus. http://www.prosefights.org/irp2020/p083019/solar1a.jpg
“intermittent” gridscale solar requires “fossil-fueled” backup, PNM VP Thomas Fallgren concludes in his ‘Energy Sources” report.
Grid scale solar and wind energy requires more fossil fuels than it will in the future and requires less than it did in the past. Check the charts and extrapolate.
Eventually, just over 1% of the planet will be covered with solar. And non thermally problematic, longer lasting batteries such as Lifepo4 (or better) shall be used.
When there is this much solar, there will be plenty of battery backup, because that’s what it will be designed for.
Granted, only about 4x today’s energy needs will ever be met by ‘terrestrial’ solar/battery. Fully 25 to 50% will be needed just to make and recycle/remake itself – because it is diffuse and intermittent. However, getting a better ‘overall’ energy returned on energy invested as time goes by.
This is why we will need so much coverage, spit out by solar/battery machines…
I can’t wait for cheap fusion (but the socialist/tax people will find something wrong with that, too, just as they did with the molten salt reactor, which was proven to be much saver than solid fueled water reactors)…
The problem is that global warming is something that can not be assumed to be just a little thing. We need nuclear, solar, wind, battery and fusion, ASAP – just in case the Earth’s climate system does go “tilt”.
The claim that intermittent solar PV and wind generation “requires fossil-fueled backup”, is more of an institutionalized “acceptance” than a technological reality. The “Solar Problem Focus”, is just that, a focus on status quo operating procedures of the past 100 years. Pricing for solar PV panels are down around $0.40 to $0.60/watt and it is becoming a “common” practice to overbuild the D.C. array in a 1.5 to 1 A.C. output ratio. This leaves plenty of “meat” left for installation of energy storage technology at a later date. It used to be the cost of panels that drove up the price of a solar PV installation, now it’s BOS components and ancillaries like BESS that are the most expensive parts of solar PV plus storage. Prices for the BESS system is coming down as World wide manufacturing ramps up. There is also the “comprehensive” systems approach of BESS, BMS, smart inverter and HMI in one package that allows the system to be more fluent in technologies used and allowing compatibility problems to be “Engineered” out of the system.
Things like, what ‘ability’ does the inverter have built into the unit? Is the inverter ‘smart enough’ to monitor the utility power use and the inverter power output to “allow” inverter control that lets only the power output needed to service the home’s energy needs under the maximum output of the inverter itself? Does the inverter have an onboard battery charge system that can be (both) AC and DC coupled? The HMI does it have actual smart energy use programming that can determine when and how much power is used from the battery during the day, during the night? The ones who have had experience with top of the line residential products like the Sonnen ecolinx 20 are saying this expensive system is around $26k up to $28k to install in one’s home. (Yet), if one is looking at solar PV with BESS, it might cost less overall if one gets a combined system with more options incorporated into the overall design. It’s looking like now some inverter companies are looking at the solar PV market as an option of adding energy storage to once grid tied only systems. This move towards using in place solar PV for a “self consumption” system, is driving high voltage battery storage to go from solar PV panel strings, to D.C. buss voltages of from 300 to 400VDC then into the BESS and the inverter there switches out the power when determined by HMI programming. It’s the control that gives the homeowner/adopter more options with their own energy generation resource.
Why are they still using flammable, thermally problematic, lesser cycle life batteries! They should be using the proven safety, reliability and even faster charge, discharge capable LFP, which stands for Lifepo4, lithium iron phosphate. Their only disadvantage is slightly less energy density. Their slightly lower voltage makes it impossible for them to catch on fire in adverse conditions. Which ought to be a selling point that more than justifies the slightly larger package.
As if a stationary battery can’t be just 10% larger.
Silly birds, nimble batteries are for cars (with cooling systems)!