CellCube's 8 Hour Flow Battery Enters the German Storage Market
#EnergyStorage #FlowBattery @CellCubeEnergy CellCube Energy delivered its first 8 hr duration vanadium energy storage system to the German municipal utility Gelsenwasser for their EnerPrax project in the Saerbeck Bioenergy Park https://read.bi/2L71xAL
Velerity Insight - The town of Saerbeck in Germany, with 7,500 residents, has set a target of being net energy zero by 2030. As part of that goal, they have installed 9 MW of solar on their roofs, built several biogas plants, put in a renewable district heating system, installed a solar farm and built a series of of wind turbines, and installed an electric vehicle charging station. Future plans include installing a district geothermal heating system and advanced storage capabilities.
The town has repurposed a 90 hectare former army depot into an energy park, integrating wind, solar, bioenergy and energy storage. The town has installed a CellCube vanadium flow battery energy storage system to test and evaluate long term storage, targeting eight hour storage. The pressure is on globally to test and evaluate the opportunity to use energy storage to release generation and transmission and distribution pressures associated with high penetrations of variable renewable energy systems.
The second phase of the energy storage industry, running roughly from 2000 to 2015, has been dominated by energy storage systems for providing ancillary services, mostly frequency regulation. The third phase, from 2015 to perhaps 2020, has been dominated by energy storage systems used for helping commercial and industrial customers reduce their peak demand charges. The fourth phase of energy storage is likely to be the installation of energy storage systems coupled with solar energy systems in residential, commercial and utility-scale applications to monetize stranded electrons.
The fifth phase of energy storage is the integration of energy storage to time shift power on the grid, enabling high penetration of variable renewable energy without requiring conventional generation resources. This scenario requires low cost long duration energy storage solutions, which does not exist, and which will be a major focus of investment, research and development over the next ten to fifteen years. Flow batteries represent an important technical advance and are likely to play a very important part in the time shifting market for energy storage systems. The Saerbeck deployment of the CellCube vanadium flow battery system represents an important point along the line of long duration storage development.
