How new home batteries are influencing the storage game for Renewable Energy?
Since for the past 6 years the price of battery storage has fallen more than 4 times to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour in 2016, alternative energy solutions are becoming more affordable. And according to a research by Panasonic, by 2025, the cost of battery storage may be half of what it is today.
Energy storage and the falling prices of battery, wind and solar power play an essential role in the up growth of renewable energy’s popularity. The key question is how to build in parallel wind and solar resources along with energy storage, so that there is the right amount of electricity at every time!? And there is no doubt that the new developments in the batteries are influencing the sustainable energy market, both residential and large scale.
After building a Gigafactory in Nevada, Tesla is outdoing itself by building an even larger battery plant in China and this summer it will deliver to South Australia the biggest lithium ion battery in the world.
Tesla is not the only player in the clean energy market. A 400-acre “sustainable small town”, called Peña Station Next, is a large energy project in Denver, a collaboration between the local government, Xcel Energy, and Panasonic, that will connect a number of solar panels to a 1-megawatt, grid-connected battery in order to provide energy for its needs. “The parties involved here are trying to figure out how you design a really large-scale build-out, a city from the start,” explained Matthew Futch, NREL’s director of global business development. The first smart-city experiment in Japan is known as the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town.
What makes energy storage so appealing for consumers is the ability to avoid high energy costs during peak hours. Utilities are also recognizing the benefits of reducing peak-hour power usage and are introducing more energy storage to the grid. In fact, last month, the United Kingdom opened their power grid to storage batteries.
In California, LBA Reality installed better and one of the biggest megawatt battery system in the U.S., and it will spare the company $900,000 just in its first year in operation.
Image credit: Panasonic
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