According to the energy storage market monitoring report of GTM in the fourth quarter of 2017, the energy storage market has become the fastest growing part of the U.S. solar market.
There are two basic types of energy storage deployment: one is grid side energy storage, commonly known as grid scale energy storage. There is also a user side energy storage system. Owners and enterprises can better manage the solar power generation system by using the energy storage system installed in their own places, and charge when the power demand is low. GTM’s report shows that more utility companies are beginning to incorporate energy storage deployment into their long-term plans.
Grid scale energy storage enables utility companies to balance power fluctuations around the grid. This will be an important part of the utility industry, where some of the big power stations provide electricity to millions of consumers, who are distributed within 100 miles, with thousands of power producers sharing electricity locally.
This transformation will usher in an era in which many small and micro grids are connected by several remote transmission lines, which will reduce the cost of building and maintaining large grids of such large substations and transformers.
Energy storage deployment will also solve the problem of grid flexibility, and many power experts claim that if too much renewable energy is fed into the grid, it will lead to power failure.
In fact, the deployment of grid scale energy storage will eliminate some traditional coal-fired power plants, and eliminate a lot of carbon, sulfur and particulate emissions from these power plants.
In the energy storage system market, the most well-known product is Tesla Powerwall. However, with the increasing popularity of residential solar energy system in the United States, many manufacturers have also invested in household solar energy or energy storage system. Competitors have sprung up to compete for the market share of household solar energy storage solutions, among which sunrun, vivintsolar and SunPower are developing particularly fast Speed.
Tesla launched the household energy storage system in 2015, hoping to change the world’s electricity use mode through this solution, so that households can use solar panels to absorb electricity in the morning, and they can use the energy storage system to supply electricity when the solar panels do not generate electricity at night, and they can also charge electric vehicles through the household energy storage system, so as to reduce the electricity cost and carbon emission.
Sunrun has the highest market share
Nowadays, solar energy and energy storage are getting cheaper and cheaper, and Tesla is no longer absolutely competitive. At present, sunrun, a residential solar energy system service provider, has the highest market share in the U.S. solar energy storage market. In 2016, the company cooperated with LGChem, a battery manufacturer, to integrate LGChem battery with its own solar energy storage solution brightbo. Now, it has been in Arizona, Massachusetts, California and charway It is estimated that this year (2018) will be released in more regions.
Vivintsolar and Mercedes Benz
Vivintsolar, a solar system manufacturer, cooperated with Mercedes Benz in 2017 to provide better residential services. Among them, Benz has already released the household energy storage system in Europe in 2016, with a single battery capacity of 2.5kwh, and can be connected in series to 20kwh at most according to household demand. The company can use its experience in Europe to improve the overall service quality.
Vivintsolar is one of the major residential system suppliers in the United States, which has installed more than 100000 household solar systems in the United States, and will continue to provide solar system design and installation in the future. The two companies hope that this cooperation can improve the efficiency of home energy supply and use.
SunPower creates a complete solution
SunPower, a solar panel manufacturer, will also launch home energy storage solutions this year. From solar panels, inverters to energy storage system equinox, they are all manufactured and designed by SunPower. Therefore, it is unnecessary to inform other manufacturers when parts are damaged, and the installation speed is faster. Moreover, the system can also save 60% of energy consumption and have a 25-year warranty.
Howard Wenger, President of SunPower, once said that the design and system of traditional household solar energy are more complex. Different companies assemble different parts, and the parts manufacturers may be different. Too complex manufacturing process may lead to performance degradation and reliability degradation, and the installation time will be longer.
As countries gradually respond to the concept of environmental protection, and the prices of solar panels and batteries are falling, the installed capacity of solar energy and energy storage in the United States will increase year by year in the future. At present, many solar energy system manufacturers and energy storage system suppliers join hands, hoping to improve the service quality in combination with their own specialties and compete in the market together. According to the financial report of Peng Bo, by 2040, the proportion of rooftop solar power generation in the United States will reach about 5%, so the solar home system with intelligent function will be more and more popular in the future.
Post time: Mar-11-2018