Reposit Power : Store Solar Energy & Trade it with Grid

A Canberra-based company is to introduce new technology that it says could help turn electricity markets on their head – by allowing households to buy and sell electricity on the market.

The buying and selling of electricity has hitherto been the province of large or specialised companies such as electricity retailers. But Reposit Power says that homes and businesses can and should be able to trade electricity with the help of battery storage, and production facilities such as solar panels.

Reposit Power plans to install battery storage in six homes around Canberra to run a six-month pilot of its technology, known as GridCredits. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency is contributing $445,000 to the $900,000 project.

Reposit Power says GridCredits is a world-first energy storage program that will put consumers in the driving seat and will "transform the grid forever."

Spokesman Luke Osborne says the technology will allow households to "buy low and sell high" – adding a new layer of possibilities to homes that have solar and storage. He says this will enable some households to virtually eradicate their bills and still remain connected to the grid by doing what the retailers do – maximising their earnings on the market.

"A lot of what retailers do is buying services from peaking power stations. Consumer with storage and solar panels can provide the same services themselves," Osborne told RenewEconomy in an interview.

"What we are doing is when it makes sense – households can be a seller, and then buy electricity at a low price."

Reposit Power is interested in using similar technology for wind farms and solar farms and for large businesses. "This is the alternative to going off-grid – households can be energy independent, at the same time as making the whole grid cleaner," Osborne says.

"Networks should be a platform for trading and exchange of electricity, so tariffs should be structured to encourage this, not to prevent it, or that will accelerate the death spiral of the grids.

"This is about households being able to go head to head with the major companies."



Reposit Power hopes to be able to broaden its rollout by mid next year, when this initial program is complete, and when it has convinced the Australian Energy Market Operator that households or businesses can be a "reliable source of power", as AEMO requires.

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said the new technology would allow consumers to gain more value from their rooftop solar PV installations. He said that one in five houses now use solar power.

"This substantial rise has made it vital to find solutions to better manage how residential solar systems operate in our electricity grids," Frischknecht said.

"Reposit's GridCredits system can control and store solar energy. This gives consumers access to their own power overnight and at peak times, reducing their demand on the grid.

"It also allows energy to be sold back into the grid by placing bids into the market, turning residential properties into micro power plants."

Frischknecht said that storage would help network operators manage demand more effectively by delivering stored power into the grid at peak times, and Reposit's technology will also help smooth out the variable delivery of solar energy.

This in turn would allow more renewables to be connected to the grid.

Reposit Power was co-founded by energy industry veteran Dean Spaccavento and scientist Lachlan Blackhall. The company says the two "shared a vision for allowing consumers to trade their electricity while contributing to a safe and cost-effective grid."




Source: Renew Economy

Competitive energy storage solutions arrive in Australia

Battery solutions that can rival electricity retail prices are arriving in the Australian market, with the potential to further disrupt incumbent utilities' business models. SolarQuip's Glen Morris said that batteries with "optimised equipment" can store electricity in homes for between $0.23/kWh to $0.28/kWh.

Morris is currently working with solar distributor Solar360 on rolling out a series of storage products and power electronics for storage solutions. Morris said that the time has arrived where battery storage can compete with retailers, under certain models. Morris' is currently running a three-day training program for the Australian Solar Council at Swinburne University.
"If you can store energy that cheaply, it suddenly makes it viable to put in a battery system in because it saves you money."

Solar360 is introducing a number of technologies to make cost competitive storage available to its installers. These include a storage-ready inverter from Chinese supplier SolaX, two sizes of inverter/chargers from Schneider Electric and two lithium-ion batteries from BYD.
"About a year ago I was quoting $1/kWh with storing electricity with a lead-acid battery," said SolarQuip's Morris. He described the pricing of the new solutions as being a "game changer". Morris explained a number of scenarios where these storage solutions can be cost-effective for households.
"If you're in New South Wales and you're on a variable tariff, you can have off-peak, shoulder and peak (pricing). Off peak is around $0.16/kWh, peak is around $0.53/kWh – that's from 2pm to 8pm. If you've got electricity at $0.16/kWh, even without any solar, with battery backup you can buy at that price during the day and then use it between 2pm and 8pm, then it's costing you around $0.40/kWh for that energy, instead of $0.53kWh," said Morris.

Morris, who is also the vice president of the Australian Solar Council, said that adding solar to battery systems makes the proposition even better. "You'd then be getting electricity for the low $0.30s/kWh, when you'd be paying the peak rate."

Naturally, this scenario doesn't apply right around Australia, and time-of-day pricing is currently not being offered to all households. In fact, some utilities are reported to being taking steps to actively discourage distributed storage.

In South Australia, the current generous FIT for PV is cancelled if a battery is added to a solar installation and on the Horizon Power grids outside of the SWIS in WA, technical requirements in some areas may make adding storage problematic. On top of that, utilities may take steps to discourage storage by increasing fixed charges to bills or by applying grid costs even if a residence goes off grid.
"Retailers are now in direct competition with their customers," said Morris. "The utilities will be pushing hard at all levels, technical, regulatory and political – so it's going to be a real battle."
Despite these potential hurdles, some remain bullish as to the cost reduction path that battery manufacturers are on.

Former Sustainable Energy Association CEO Ray Wills said that battery technology, such as lead acid and lithium-ion, are mature technologies and that for lithium-ion, increases in production for industries such as e-mobility and consumer electronics driving major increases in production volumes.
"We've seen a 600% increase in production of solar panels over the last five years and the consequence was that solar panels came down in price more than 80% over the course of several years," said Wills, "and we'll see that sort of development with batteries as well."
This will impact on battery payback periods, potentially leading to a boom in installations. "What we know at the moment is that batteries installed in the home have a payback of round and about nine to ten years, so when we see batteries drop behind a five-year repayment, we're going to see a very rapid uptake." Wills' prediction is for batteries for family homes to reach that point some time in 2015.

Source: Renew Economy

Battery storage take 4: Skinny connections to yield fat savings

Last week at Clean Energy Week in Brisbane there were lots of energy storage products on display. Most of them were focused on the emerging “self use” market where householders attempt to maximise the use of their own solar generated energy in preference to buying power from the grid.

Reports from Europe indicate that “Self Use” is really taking off now that feed-in tariffs are being wound back in key solar markets like Germany. Our local solar market is also preparing for the shift in market behaviour and expected surge in the uptake of energy storage systems.

It now appears that these very same energy storage systems may also be the key to managing a new direction in electricity network charges, and it’s not Time of Use tariffs.

In a disappointing move earlier this year the Queensland Competition Authority increased the standing service fee for Queensland’s 12-month-old Time of Use Tariff 12 from $0.78 per day to $1.13 per day, a dramatic 44.8% rise. Anecdotally, few people have signed up for Tariff 12 in its first year and that’s unlikely to change given that the flat rate Tariff 11 continues to have a much lower $0.50 connection per day.

Given the enthusiasm for Time of Use (TOU) tariffs by the electricity utilities in the southern states, Tariff 12 has been seen by many in the Queensland solar industry as the end game for tackling residential peak load. Why then would the Queensland Competition Authority make this new, opt-in TOU tariff so unpopular? It seems that another solution may be waiting in the wings.

It has been highlighted a number of times that in Queensland, due to the flat rate connection fees charged to residential electricity customers, there is a heavy degree of cross-subsidisation by small peak load homes to support high peak load homes. Or in other words if your house doesn’t have an air-conditioner you’re effectively subsidising the connection costs of your neighbour that does.



With utilities like Queensland’s Energex and Ergon building out their networks to cope with peak load events that occur just a few hours per year, everyone pays so that some can enjoy heating and cooling during the coldest and hottest periods. Much political attention has been given to the alleged inequality of solar homes being subsidised by households without solar power systems. This begs the question “what’s being done about the inequality of connection fees for air-conditioning owners?”

Taking a look at how other markets are dealing with peak load can be instructive because the pressures on network costs being felt in Australia are hardly unique. A recent trial conducted by electricity network operator Alliander in the Netherlands limited household grid connections to just six amps – less even than a single lighting circuit from an average Australian home.

To ensure that the participants in the trial didn’t experience a dramatic reduction in their life styles, the utility provided each home with a 5kW PowerRouter solar power / energy storage system from Dutch manufacturer Nedap. This allows the local loads of each house to actually draw up to 25 amps as required without tripping the six amp connection.

PowerRouters are already available in Australia along with other products with similar Self Use capabilities such as the locally manufactured Selectronic SP Pro.

Restricting the size of the network connection into a house delivers a range of clear benefits to utilities in terms of network augmentation and complexity as well as to customers by driving increased energy efficiency. From the utility’s point of view they don’t have to estimate peak load, they just add up the connection sizes for each customer on each suburban transformer.

For consumers, especially small ones, being given the option to pay a network connection that’s just the right size is a great opportunity to save money and stop cross subsidising high electricity users.

Considering the Queensland government’s recent investigation into “Fair and Reasonable” Solar Feed-in Tariffs, it seems like offering customers the chance to pay only for the connection size they need will deliver great social benefits as well.

A further benefit is that inefficient and high draw devices like air-conditioners, electric storage hot water systems and pool pumps will be more closely scrutinised when customers can see the implications to their bills.

Under such a scheme Time of Use tariffs become effectively obsolete and utilities can continue to charge flat rate tariffs, which are far lower risk from a technology point of view.

Combined solar power and energy storage systems offer a clear path forward to make such skinny network connections a reality and deliver savings for both utilities and consumers. These systems produce solar power during the day with excess production “banked” for evening use. The integrated energy storage also acting as a buffer to ensure the network connection is never exceeded.

Advanced capabilities available with these energy management systems also include modern luxuries like customer web portals, household consumption monitoring and daily power production summaries. In the near future it’s expected that utility fleet management will also be rolled out to placate any fears the network operators might have.

Energy management systems featuring solar power and energy storage systems are the future for household electricity and now we just need skinny connections to unleash fat savings for frugal consumers and network operators alike.



Dane Muldoon is commercial sales director of Solar Guys, a Queensland company that installs solar panels and battery storage products.



Source: Renew Economy

EVTV Friday Show - August 16, 2013

- EVCCON 2013

  - VW Thing first roll and dynomometer test

  - HPEVS shows 152 HP Corvette with AC35x2

- High current NMC Battery Test

EVCCON 2013 debriefing

Oops, Norvegian Ferry on fire because of a charging EV conversion using a BMS ... (few years ago, now these conversions are forbidden in Norway)

REAP Systems: They could not attend EVCCON 2013 so they sent a video to Jack on Battery Terminal Cleaning / Corrosion Protection

EV West won almost everything at EVCCON 2013 bringing their killer 1995 BMW M3 with twin Warp 11 Motors 

Jack is testing the new NMC Battery with High Discharges

A new intern at EVtv from Australia, he came to EVCCON and simply asked JAck to stay and work with him for a few months, which he accepted :-)

=> Results: 2 cells killed during Ultra High Discharge Tests :-(

Some more EVCCON 2013 videos

Jason Horak's 1987 Dodge Daytona EV on the drag way

VW Things running against each other

Porsche 911 Electric on the dyno

Jack's Electric VW THING is rolling, and drag racing too

A new intern from Victoria, Australia : James Robert George Frederick

with Jack's (or Jack's wife's) Tesla Model S

Raymond Derkauf from New Electric / EVtv Europe in Amsterdam, colleague and friend of Anne Kloppenborg 

Bill Ritchie from HPEVS AC Motors was there too

Ten Bucks a Litre - Dick Smith Documentary cherry picks the facts

A recently aired Australian documentary by local eccentric millionaire Dick Smith about alternatives to fossil fuels has stirred quite a hornets nest of feedback, both positive and negative.



While on the whole the Doco was fairly interesting and we here at EV News noted Dick's enthusiasm for electric cars, some facts seem to have been seriously cherry picked.

The EV segment starts @47 mins with Dick enthusing about an EV powered only by renewables and which has Vehicle to Grid Technology (V2G) that can held smooth the intermittency of renewable energy.

The cherry picking starts @50 mins when to close the segment Dick holds up a flask containing 1 litre of fuel stating that it weighs 700 grams and will take an average car approx 10 km. The bad news for EV's, we are told, is that the equivalent battery would weigh 25x as much! End of argument apparently and the story moves onto bio-fuels.

What Dick failed to mention was that the equivalent of that 1 litre of fuel (10 kWh) stored in an EV battery can propel an electric car 10x as far (100 km)... surely a worthy trade-off in energy efficiency Dick?

Of course, battery power may not be a solution for his Helicopter any time soon but Dick was so impressed with EVs he is now the proud owner of a solar powered Nissan Leaf.


Source: Electric Vehicle News

Dick Smith vs Tim Flannery, and the Solar Revolution

It turns out that Australians may not as dumb as Dick Smith would have us believe, at least as far as electricity choices are made. The self-made entrepreneur, aviator and now aspiring energy expert made much in his “Ten Bucks a Litre” documentary last week about the inadequacy of renewables – they are expensive, and intermittent, and they can’t do the job.

And in a blithe dismissal of the ability of households to act smarter, and substitute energy-hogging appliances with more efficient ones, he said there would never be enough solar panels on a household to here will never be enough panels to meet their requirement.

But Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery has another viewpoint: He says Australians are rushing to embrace solar for a simple reason – it is saving them money, because it is cheaper to generate electricity on the rooftop of their home than to source it through the massive grid. And because it also has the happy outcome of forcing dirty electricity generation out of the market.

The Climate Commission today releases a detailed 45-page report on the future of solar – a study that is likely to get buried under the frenzy of media attention on the first day of the election campaign. And that’s a pity, says Flannery, because the “solar revolution” has gone virtually un-noticed by the mainstream media, but its impact is already being felt within the electricity industry.

Flannery says the arrival of cost-competitive solar is one of the biggest things that has happened in the fight to address climate change and limit greenhouse gas emissions. “Solar is clearly is good for the battle on climate change,” Flannery told RenewEconomy in an interview. “It is replacing old, polluting infrastructure with new, clean infrastructure. For me, solar is the big story. It is way above everything else (that has been achieved).

Flannery dismisses the ideas promoted by the likes of Dick Smith – who with the aid of images from dancing “greenies” at a Bellingen festival – likes to promote the idea that renewables are expensive and intermittent, and therefore of not much practical use. Flannery says such ideas are “well outdated”. From the perspective of individual consumer, he notes, rooftop solar is already cost competitive with the grid.

Flannery says solar will challenge utilities, and the centralized generation model of the electricity sector, and will have the same impact as the internet has had on the media, where the viability of printed newspapers is threatened by the popularity of online information.


“This is coming, like it or not,” Flannery says. “And nothing short of banning solar PV will prevent it. We can have a stable grid with a lot of solar PV. We may have to look at what the future is for major utilities, and this is a significant issue because it looks at how we run a new grid. But it is not insurmountable.”

Flannery’s comments echo the conclusions of a range of international investment banks, independent analysts, as well as the biggest utilities and generators in the US and Europe, who all conclude that solar will become a “no-brainer” for consumers (be they homes or businesses).

Smith’s message was that renewables were expensive and intermittent, and therefore couldn’t do the job. It’s a conclusion typical of those who advocate, as Smith does, that the only solution is nuclear, and who cannot see beyond the current centralised model of generation. It’s at odds with most modern thinking, even including the conclusions of the 100% renewables scenario completed by the Australian Energy Market Operator.

But technology has moved on, and so have costs. The Climate Commission report concludes that solar PV is already providing the most affordable form of electricity production for retail consumers – a conclusion already arrived at by international investment banks, independent analysts and the biggest utilities and generators in the US and Europe, who all conclude that solar will become a “no-brainer” for consumers (be they homes or businesses).

Instead of a market dominated by a few large producers or electricity providers, Flannery says there are now countless numbers of “pro-sumers”, householders and businesses that produce their own electricity. That changes the financial model for existing utilities, he says, because it lowers demand at peak times when they are used to making most of their money.

“The economic model that we run the power industry doesn’t work any more,” he says. And the industry faces an even bigger challenge with the arrival of batteries, which he suspects will be competitive within a few years.

“This is an evolutionary thing – and the one thing that we can do is to make sure that we have a stable electricity supply. We will need the right elements in place to make sure that (those elements) are delivered in time – and we can look to Germany for that.” One of the key issues is the cost of the grid, and how it impacts those who do not have access to solar.

The Climate Commission report has a couple of interesting graphics which we thought we would highlight. The first is this, looking at the amount invest by each country in 2012 in solar, and the country’s relative solar resources. It should be pointed out that the $3.8 billion spent in Australia came almost exclusively from households. Much of the investment in other countries would have come from commercial investments in larger scale installations. The table at the end highlights the extent of solar hot water usage, which still dominates solar PV by a large factor.

The second graph is a bit of fun – and highlights some of the individual records for each state. Whatever happened to Tasmania?

Source: Renew Economy

Australian utilities urged to prepare for rapid storage adoption

“Batteries are a little bit like bacon. Everything is better with batteries,” quipped Michelle Taylor of Queensland utility Ergon Energy at session on energy storage at Clean Energy Week in Brisbane.

“There’s no doubt that storage linked with the appropriate interface mechanism presents fantastic opportunities for the customer and utility,” the utility’s technology development manager added more formally. Yet in Ergon’s home state of Queensland, grid-connected batteries supporting solar PV are currently unavailable to residential customers.

With opportunities under review by both Ergon and its state-owned counterpart Energex, storage proponents are concerned that energy storage will end up down the same bumpy road travelled precariously by residential solar PV over the several years.

“Utilities were caught by surprise by the uptake of PV. This time, with storage we need to have them involved,” said Bruce Leslie, R&D manager and director at Brisbane-based LC Energy.

“Government subsidies are very important if we are to have a viable system, and we need the support of the utilities and generators,” he added. A residential peak demand tariff would make grid-connected home batteries an economic proposition.

“The PV industry tends to view itself as saving the planet – the stairway to heaven – and who could possibly object [to their existence]?”

But the Energex view of PV is very different; after all it lost 14 per cent of the energy distributed for the same peak demand. The Queensland-owned utility received 14% less income for no change in costs.

Ergon’s Taylor admits many challenges stand in the way of efficient electricity network management. “We have a vast network as a distribution company and while the whole system-load may look one way, the various distribution networks may look very different,” she says, noting Ergon is one of the most dispersed distribution companies in the country with about 130,000 km of line and 65,000 km serving only 25,000 customers – equivalent to one customer every 3km.

Although the cost of storage is falling quickly, uptake of energy storage by the distributors is severely hampered by outdated policies and regulations, which Taylor expects to disperse with some of the new policy directives issued by the state government.

Ergon is looking at ways of integrating renewable energy onto its square networks.

“Renewables are great, but if you put renewables onto square alignments, it’s a disaster…. just plonking renewables doesn’t do a thing for us, in fact it causes a lot of problems for us.


Ecoult, a company spun out of the CSIRO and now owned by the US’s East Penn Manufacturing, has developed energy storage solutions which are suited to isolated grids. The company also offers a fix for power companies wanting to implement the integration of gas or diesel with renewables.

“You can pay for the storage [cost] from what you gain by running the diesel in a fuel-efficient zone rather than not running it in a fuel efficient zone. And the storage is to take care of the renewable variability,” said John Wood, CEO of energy storage company Ecoult.

Ecoult’s Ultrabattery is a completely new class of lead-acid technology, the company claims. It’s a hybrid, long-life lead-acid energy storage device containing both an Ultracapacitor and a lead-acid battery in a common electrolyte.

The company is approaching potential customers both in Australia and abroad. “The good thing in Australia is you have the chance to mature the technologies here and supply them to the international business model,” Wood said.

Ecoult will supply the largest battery-based renewable energy storage system in Australia to Hydro Tasmania’s King Island Renewable Energy Project. The 3 MW/1.6 MWh UltraBattery storage system – to be installed later this year – will complement other elements of Hydro Tasmania’s project, which in recent weeks has managed to switch off diesel generators for up to 90 minutes, relying solely on wind power.

The King Island project came in the wake of Ecoult’s success at ‘smoothing wind’ in Hampton, where is implemented a MW scale wind power storage system using UltraBattery. It demonstrated the ability to smooth turbine’s output (turbine plus battery – orange line) using an algorithm developed by the CSIRO.

Wood went on to explain the Ultrabattery’s application in solar PV smoothing and firming at Public Service Co. of New Mexico’s (PNM) Prosperity Project, located south of Albuquerque.

The project integrates an advanced VRLA (Valve-Regulated Lead-Acid) and UltraBattery energy storage solution with a separately installed 500KW solar plant.

Few standalone opportunities for large-scale grid-connected energy storage systems exist without government incentives.

In the US, where Ecoult launched the Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland Interconnection Regulation Services project, the government awarded grants to get storage projects up quickly. Subsequently, government support turned to regulation and will eventually move further towards tax credits.

“There’s a lot of federal support in the US and state support in California through regulation. All of that means you can do storage and have standalone economic justification,” Wood said.

In a challenging market such as Australia, it is up to technology developers to prove their mettle, Wood believes.

“If you are representing the capabilities of a technology it is really up to you to demonstrate to the market the viability and purpose and really push your case.

LC Energy’s Bruce Leslie has taken this path, producing a study that compares ‘energy shifting’ with ‘peak shaving’ applications for a typical moderate-to-high energy-use house. He found that the peak-shaving application uses less energy from the battery, while that batter doesn’t cycle as deeply.

The peak-shaving application is set up to monitor the grid power. Whenever the grid exceeds a set point, power is taken from the batteries.

If Energex and Ergon introduce an optional residential peak demand tariff households have an incentive to switch to a peak-shaving application.

“We can shave a lot off the peak with a relatively small mount of storage. In fact, as we add storage we actually get diminishing returns, give the costs to the system is the mount of storage,” Leslie said.

“I think we can move to a peak-shaving scenario on a reasonable peak demand residential tariff,” he added.

Utilities and governments must get in front of the curve and set standards that will drive desired behaviours, Leslie said.

Talking to Renew Economy, Leslie warns Ergon and Energex are perhaps a year or two away from a flood of cheap batteries and cheap systems coming into the country that will take them out of the driving seat.

“I think they are in denial. Storage will be undeniably big in the future. Will they avoid the problems that arose with PV? So far I can’t see it.”



Source: Renew Economy