Tropical Storm Isaias battered New York City and Long Island on the first day of the three-day, 10th annual conference held last week by the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST).

The storm on Aug. 4 left nearly 1 million island and city residents without power and prevented Mike Voltz of PSEG Long Island from participating as scheduled in a utility storage panel, while technical problems with the virtual platform made New York Public Service Commission Chair John B. Rhodes the de facto opening speaker.

None of those problems, however, seemed to stop the more than 400 conference participants, nor the panelists dedicated to energy storage in all its permutations.

NYISO and all power-related state agencies are working to achieve the goals set out by last July’s landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which include getting 70% of the state’s electricity from renewables and deploying 3 GW of energy storage by 2030.

“Everything is combining all at once now, so it’s impossible not to be bullish on New York whenever it comes to batteries,” said Jeff Bishop, CEO of Key Capture Energy.

Following is some of what we overheard at the event.

Setting the Table

Rhodes said the PSC’s most important action on storage so far has been issuing its December 2018 order to “set the table” for the deployment of storage, with milestones now of 1.5 GW by 2025 and 3 GW by 2030 (18-E-0130).

“Our investor-owned utilities will continue to procure at least 350 MW of bulk storage dispatch rights,” Rhodes said. “And we are examining — as many of you have urged us to — storage demand charges within the revised standby rates based on a cost allocation approach that is more granular, but importantly, more accurate.”

He said the PSC is reviewing the IOUs’ proposals for three-year dynamic load management, starting in 2021. In storage, dynamic load management means optimizing load so that power is evenly distributed to all resources that are charging simultaneously, including electric vehicles, and that the batteries charge to full volume when capacity is sufficient.

“In terms of resource adequacy, our staff and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority continue to advocate for changes to NYISO’s buyer-side mitigation [BSM] rules,” Rhodes said. “That’s a set of actions that will come ahead of our resource adequacy proceeding.”

FERC Partly OKs NYISO Mitigation Language.)

To demonstrate the rapid growth of storage resources in New York, Rhodes shared a graph showing how storage interconnection queues grew from 887 MW to 1,264 MW in the first half of the year.

David Lovelady, a principal engineer at National Grid, spoke of co-optimizing storage projects through value stacking to maximize total benefits, in particular with a solicitation last year for four storage projects upstate and in the capital region, each to be a minimum 10 MW.

“Perhaps during spring load periods when the load is lighter … we can participate more in the ISO market, and when it comes to the summer period when we have peak load, then we might need to hold some state of charge back for a reliability event,” Lovelady said. “We’re working closely with NYISO on these projects.”

Global Politics and Safety

Professor M. Stanley Whittingham of Binghamton University, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work with lithium-ion batteries, gave the conference a unique perspective on the storage industry.

A NY-BEST founding director and still the organization’s research chair, Whittingham in January was named by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to lead a task force to provide the state with an aggressive roadmap to the EV future.

“The lithium-ion battery will help mitigate what I call the messing up of the world,” Whittingham said.

“We need to further build a New York state ecosystem for energy storage,” he said. “We’ve got great universities; we’ve got Brookhaven National Lab, with all its capabilities; we’ve got New York BEST [and] the very supportive state government; but what we really need to do is develop new manufacturing technologies.”

Whittingham said that the U.S. and Canada need to use research and development to leapfrog the existing 30-year-old technologies used in Asia.

“We need to be to some extent self-contained,” he said. “All the anode materials, the graphite, comes through China, and essentially all the cobalt comes through China, so that is creating issues and will create issues in the future.”

The industry also should strive to eliminate toxic chemicals from the manufacturing process and, in time, to make the cells in a way that enables deconstruction and makes recycling easier, Whittingham said.

“Another way we could have a large saving in capital expense is to provide for an effective solid electrolyte interphase formation. This is the layer formed on the graphite anode. It takes from one week to three weeks of break-in on the manufacturing site. If we could do that during the actual manufacturing of the cells, we’d save a lot of money for everybody,” he said.

One area that has been somewhat neglected, Whittingham said, is to provide for more effective heat management and safety.

“We’ve seen the issues with Samsung, and there were safety issues we saw in the Boeing 787, where really those batteries had not been designed for effective heat management or for safety,” he said. “Right now, a group of us are working to propose building a new factory, a pilot battery facility with manufacturing capability within the state. … We believe there are opportunities to build U.S. manufacturing and the supply chain within the U.S. and Canada, which has lots of nickel and quite a lot of lithium.”

Exciting Times

The year 2020 would have been an unusually impactful one for the state’s grid operator even without the adjustments necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, NYISO CEO Rich Dewey said.

“When you look at what’s going on in the utility industry — the electric space — it probably is the most exciting time, certainly in my career, and maybe in the history of the industry,” Dewey said.

The CLCPA has amped up the approach and the process to transitioning to a clean energy power sector and economy, but NYISO is first and foremost responsible for reliability, markets and planning, he said.

In planning for the changes underway, the ISO is not taking “a deterministic approach but really looking at what are the guiderails, what are the options, and that will allow developers, policymakers and system planners the ability to see what different mixes of different resource types will look like, and ultimately what they’ll cost, and what is the most efficient resource mix,” Dewey said.

The ISO’s planning team knows that the interconnection queue has been a barrier to timely and rapid entry for new technologies, he said.

“Storage technologies can probably be deployed faster than any of the other renewable or innovative types of resources, so we knew we had to revamp the interconnection class year, and I’m happy to say we’re getting very close to finishing up the first class year under these new rules,” Dewey said. “The previous class year had 26 projects, and it took us 26 months. … This year’s class year started with about 91 projects, and I think we’re going to be on target to [complete the reviews in] about 13 months, maybe 14 months.”

Dewey also highlighted the ISO’s progress on formulating market rules for storage, noting that earlier in the week, FERC gave final confirmation on most of the rules. (See related story, NYISO’s 2nd Storage Compliance Almost Hits Mark.)

Because hybrid resources such as solar paired with storage are increasingly popular with developers, NYISO last month decided to accelerate its hybrid modeling capability, both within its markets and within its system. The ISO hopes to complete the market enhancement next year, he said.

“More broadly, properly sited and properly configured and performing storage provides tremendous flexibility to different transmission scenarios,” Dewey said. “Whether it’s a two-hour asset or a four-hour asset, whether it’s in New York City close to the load or located upstate near a critical transmission constraint, we want to be able to start exposing some of those variations to our planning studies, so then developers can make investment decisions that most benefit the system and give them the highest return.”

In the Market

LS Power subsidiary Ravenswood Power, the largest power plant in New York City, representing more than 20% of installed capacity in Zone J, last year won regulatory approval to build a 316-MW battery storage facility on its site in Queens. (See “Largest Storage Project in New York,” NYPSC Projects Lower Winter Energy Prices.)

“We’ve seen with the advent of policies over time, like Local Law 97 [capping greenhouse gas emissions for buildings] and CLCPA, there will be a need for replacement capacity to be developed to serve the needs that our facilities currently serve, so we want to be on the forefront of developing that capacity,” Ravenswood CEO Clint Plummer said.

For a big increase of capacity from intermittent renewable resources to work on a system level, “we’re going to need large-scale bulk and distributed energy storage in quantities that have not been seen on systems anywhere else in the world, and New York remains out in front in terms of a policy perspective of thinking through what that means,” Plummer said.

Allyson Sand is a project developer at Plus Power, a battery energy storage company focused on utility-scale storage using a data-driven approach, with a portfolio of 2,000 MW in projects around the country.

In New York, Plus Power is developing several projects, with a focus on zones A, K and G, Sand said.

“At the state level, we see a lot of positive activity happening, with significant investment from the utilities and from NYISO to incorporate storage,” Sand said. “It’s clear to us that the state is really committed to achieving their goal and making storage possible on a larger scale.”