The session will consider the key drivers and legislation behind the energy storage market; the influence of net-zero, renewable, and direct energy storage targets. Examine market dynamics of a rapidly evolving sector and look at the major energy storage markets to consider where growth and next-generation technologies are evolving. Here the focus will be on the US market, with discussion around how its position differs from Europe and China, as well as the impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act. The conversation will cover pressing issues in the storage market such as safety, battery chemistry choice, and project duration trends.

Several challenges currently face electric utilities. Focusing on energy storage may help solve some of these challenges. The energy-storage grid-benefits taxonomy and the energy-storage grid-benefits research framework are a promising start for researchers to understand and fully bring the benefits of energy storage to the future smart grid. The goal is to identify areas for future research endeavors and illustrate new research directions to advance future research in the energy-informatics domain and enable the smart grid.

E Source estimates that by the end of this decade, more than 2 TWh's of stationary storage batteries will be deployed globally. A battery-based grid will be cleaner, more efficient and cheaper to operate than the traditional fossil-fuel-based grid. This presentation will explore how the grid will change as batteries become an integral part of it. It also will explore the types of batteries that will be used.

Integration of battery storage in commercial and industrial sites offers various business cases such as increasing PV self-sufficiency, peak shaving, time-of-use energy cost management, and meanwhile even arbitrage. Furthermore, they can offer services for heavily loaded distribution grids, for instance, caused by increasing numbers of charging stations for electric passenger cars and commercial vehicles. In this context, innovative energy management systems with sophisticated operating control strategies for such multi-use concepts play a central role in securing technical performance in terms of safety, reliability, and efficiency as well as in optimizing the revenue streams of the battery storage investment.

Traditional storage plus solar (PV) applications have involved the coupling of independent storage and PV inverters at an AC bus, or alternatively the use of multi-input hybrid inverters. Here we will examine how a new cost-effective approach of coupling energy storage to existing PV arrays with a DC-to-DC converter can help maximize production and profits for existing and new utility-scale installations. This new approach leads to higher round-trip efficiencies and lower cost of integration with existing PV arrays, and at the same time opens up new use cases and revenue streams not possible with traditional AC-coupled solar plus storage.

Grid energy storage components such as batteries, power electronics, and sensors are individually validated under certain conditions in laboratory settings. However, unexpected challenges often arise when these components are integrated in grid-scale systems. This talk will cover the data points that can be collected at different scales of energy storage development to minimize surprises during operation of fielded systems.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), in partnership with the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga (EPB), has embarked on a mission to build the working architecture for a modernized 21st century electric distribution system. This work focuses on methods for integrating large numbers of DER, microgrids, intelligent loads, and EVs into the distribution system effectively.

The use of large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) to provide ancillary services for the electricity grid, particularly the frequency containment reserve (FCR), is becoming increasingly attractive. The all-copper redox flow battery (CuRFB), which is based on RFB technology, is designed in a way that is simple, modular, scalable, and secure. This research main goal is to introduce all-copper redox flow batteries as a potential energy storage system for power grid frequency regulation services. The performance of these batteries is considered based on KPIs in this market because the FCR market is mature in Europe, particularly in Nordic countries that have high penetration of renewables in their grids. Experimentation serves as the foundation for all the analysis.

As electromobility ramps up, the relevance of a functioning circular economy increases. In addition to recycling, the circular economy also includes strategies that extend the useful life of battery systems. These strategies also include re-use, describing the further use of battery systems in second-life applications. The most relevant second-life applications are stationary battery storage systems, used for various grid services. Numerous barriers exist during implementation of these. The most important solution approaches to overcome these barriers are addressed in the presentation.

Repurposing and reusing EV batteries before they are recycled can significantly improve their value proposition. Smartville has developed a highly-versatile energy storage building block, MOAB, with patented battery management hardware and data-driven performance qualifications to achieve safe and reliable EV battery reuse at-scale. This presentation will cover key challenges and misconceptions of repurposing EV batteries and Smartville’s innovative approaches to those problems.

The Electrochemical Safety Research Institute (ESRI) has carried out research in the area of flow batteries. Two different flow battery chemistries, namely, the vanadium system and the Zn/Bromine system have been studied to characterize the performance and the safety. The major focus is on the safety of these systems under off-nominal conditions such as overcharge, over-discharge, and external short circuit. The results of the studies for both systems will be presented.

This presentation introduces a sub-millimeter, bundled microtubular (SBMT) flow battery cell configuration that significantly improves volumetric power density of flow battery cell stack by reducing the membrane-to-membrane distance by almost 100 times and eliminating the bulky flow distributors completely. The SBMT cell is compatible with virtually all redox chemistries and represents a device-level innovation to enhance the volumetric power of flow batteries and potentially reduce their size and cost.

The limited availability of a high-performance catholyte has hindered development of aqueous organic redox flow batteries (AORFB) for large-scale energy storage. Here we report iron complexes with 2,2’-bipyridine-4,4’-dicarboxylic (Dcbpy) acid and cyanide ligands. A symmetry-breaking design strategy leads to dramatically enhanced solubility (up to 1.22 M) even with bulky organic ligands. The redox potential of the complex could be easily adjusted by combining two ligands, leading to a tunable redox potential for the catholyte. This work demonstrated a high-performance AORFB catholyte and a general strategy for designing metal complex materials for future high-energy-density AORFBs.