Jigar Shah, DoE and utilities speak at Energy Storage Association event in Texas next week

Electrolytes being filled into a lithium-ion cell, pre-formation by a worker at Fraunhofer ISE. Image: Fraunhofer ISE.
SunEdison co-founder Jigar Shah will deliver a keynote address at next week’s Energy Storage Association annual conference and exhibition in Texas.

Taking place from 27 to 29 May at the Hyatt Regency Dallas, the event’s organisers promise that over 1,000 “leaders and influencers” will attend networking sessions. Shah, who is now president of specialist finance company Generate Capital, is the former CEO of SunEdison as well as former CEO of the NGO Carbon War Room. He will deliver “Following in the footsteps of renewables: Growing an industry and financing energy storage”, which aims to show how the adoption of storage can build on lessons learned from the experience of the renewable energy industry over the past few years.

Other organisations and companies speaking at the event represent a bona fide “who’s who” of the US energy storage market landscape. They include government and trade body representatives from the US Department of Energy, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and California Energy Storage Alliance (CESA).

Research and analysis firms including GTM Research and Navigant will also be speaking, while the dozens of companies making presentations will include Tesla Motors, ViZn Energy, Princeton Power, Eos Energy Storage and RES America.

As regular readers of PV Tech Storage may know, utilities in the US have become increasingly proactive on storage recently, making significant procurements and deployments. These are driven both from mandated targets and from commercial perspectives. Utilities speaking at the event include Duke Energy and Southern California Edison, while a presentation from PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organisation (RTO) which has fostered a market for frequency regulation within its service area, is likely to be of particular interest to organisations looking at the grid-stabilising functions of energy storage and how to commercialise them.

The conference will look at both behind-the-meter and in-front-of-the-meter storage applications. Headline sponsor, the utility Oncor, will allow guests to tour its advanced microgrid facility, recently completed in partnership with S&C Electric and Schneider.

It will also be interesting to see if a recent study commissioned by Oncor and put together by consultancy The Brattle Group, will play a key role in the event’s discussions. The report, issued at the very beginning of this year, looked at how policy could enable a market for grid-connected energy storage systems by allowing energy storage to provide a number of key services – also known as “benefit stacking”. One expert, energy researcher Melissa C Lott, told PV Tech Storage at the time of the report’s publication that it was a “seemingly elegant solution” to many of the challenges faced by the electricity network in Texas’ ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) service area.

Meanwhile, next month’s Intersolar Europe show, taking place on 9 and 10 June in Munich, will feature an extended scientific conference on electrical energy storage, in addition to the exhibition strand which also ran last year. The ees Europe Conference will be hosted and organised by Fraunhofer ISE, which will present its findings on the accelerated formation of lithium-ion cells at the event.

“With the conference, the electrical storage sector now has a platform where storage solutions for PV and other renewable energy applications as well as the topics of energy management and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) are addressed,” Matthias Vetter, head off off-grid PV solutions and battery system technology at Fraunhofer said.

“The international exchange across all sectors generates a synergy effect that advances the entire industry.”