Moving Beyond the Current State of Solar Plus Storage
Due to growing concerns about the environmental impacts of fossil fuels and the capacity and resilience of energy grids around the world, engineers, building owners, utility companies, and policymakers are increasingly turning their attention to energy storage solutions. Although energy storage has come a long way in the last twenty years, the current state of the solar plus storage industry is relatively small. According to the Center for Sustainable Systems, only 2.5% of delivered electric power in the U.S. is cycled through a storage facility. This means that the solar energy we collect is not fully utilized because we have no way to store it. With the costs of solar installations continuing to decrease and customers seeking reliable renewable power options, energy storage becomes a key component for increasing grid resiliency and decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels.
Currently, BloombergNEF predicts the energy storage market will require $662 billion in investment over the next two decades. By 2026, analysts at Navigant Research also expect the energy storage market to exceed $23 billion. Today the most common solutions either come in large storage containers or are installed in dedicated storage rooms, which not only make them cumbersome to install but pose significant safety concerns. In addition to these hurdles, there are also significant engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC), and soft costs involved in storage installations. Let’s take a closer look at these costs and what they mean for your company.
The Real Costs: Current Storage Installations
Currently, one of the largest barriers to storage is the cost of installation. According to McKinsey & Company, soft costs and balance of hardware can add upwards of 60% to total system costs, often making energy storage installation too expensive to deploy.
Now let’s think about a project’s EPC and soft costs, which can be significant. EPC costs vary greatly with each project and scale up with the size of the energy storage system. Soft costs for solar plus storage installations include items such as permitting, interconnection, customer acquisition, project origination, and other overhead. In addition to soft costs, siting can be extremely costly for commercial and industrial (C&I) projects, especially for larger-scale installations, where engineering, financial, and legal experts get involved. Larger systems also need a dedicated plot of valuable real estate approximately the size of a shipping container, if not bigger. According to a report by Wood Mackenzie, as new fire codes and standards concerning energy storage systems are adopted, pricing for these systems may increase.
Despite the costs associated with energy storage systems, they are starting to gain traction with many developers. Energy storage systems are also seen as an innovative means for providing more reliable energy when and where people need it most. Moreover, solar plus storage solutions are becoming more attractive because of declining solar costs, decreasing battery costs, and growing mandates for energy storage across the U.S.
Moving Forward: Simplifying Solar With Storage
To begin utilizing solar energy at greater capacities, we need to consider new innovations in energy storage such as panel-level storage. Panel-level storage is a cutting-edge and efficient way to store solar energy directly where it’s captured - at the solar module. In its simplest form, panel-level storage consists of modular battery units that attach to industry-standard solar racking systems on the underside of each solar module, collect energy from the sun, and deploy the energy when it is needed. At scale, panel-level storage will enable grid resiliency and reliability in new and affordable ways.
Yotta Energy (Yotta), has developed the SolarLEAF™, a first-of-its-kind panel-level storage battery that simplifies storage. The SolarLEAF™ is the first storage battery with passive thermal regulation that, at about the size of a briefcase, fits perfectly under any industry-standard solar module. The SolarLEAF™ is equipped with a built-in DC optimizer with wireless monitoring and offsets concrete ballast weight requirements for ballasted solar installations. The full production model will be compatible with PV string inverters, microinverters, and hybrid inverters making the SolarLEAF™the easiest energy storage device to include in your solar plus storage projects.
When compared to an example 100 kW project, Yotta’s SolarLEAF™ solution can reduce the soft and EPC costs involved with installation by over 70%. Yotta’s SolarLEAF™ solution doesn’t require additional land, or infrastructure improvements (i.e., trenching, wiring, etc.). Yotta’s solution also significantly lowers risk and construction cost which are notoriously difficult to estimate and control during the project. Refer to Figure 1 for a breakdown of soft and EPC costs per kWh from an example 100kW storage project. Yotta’s SolarLEAF™ solution makes solar plus storage easier, more reliable, and safer.
Figure 1: Breakdown of Soft and EPC Costs per kWh for Example 100 kW Project
With innovations in panel-level storage like the SolarLEAF™, Yotta is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible as they simplify solar plus storage. Yotta is developing resilient energy storage solutions to give building owners control over their power generation and consumption. Yotta is not only simplifying solar plus storage, they are unlocking the power of the sun.