Energy Storage
Title : Future-proofing Asian cities the smart way
Medium : Eco-Business
Date : 6 October 2016
Future-proofing Asian cities the smart way
Asia Pacific is set to pass a major milestone in 2018: The United Nations predicts that more than half its population will be living in cities by then, meaning the region can no longer be regarded as predominantly rural.
More than 2 billion of the region’s 4.3 billion people already live in urban areas, and another 1 billion will join them by 2040. But already, many Asian cities are buckling under the stress of this unprecedented rate of urbanisation.
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Slums, hazardous air pollution levels, mountains of unprocessed waste, and the dreaded practice of load-shedding — that is, intentional power cuts in some areas engineered to prevent a city-wide blackout — are just a few visible symptoms of the stress on the economic, transport, waste management, and energy infrastructure of cities.
Many policymakers and planners have turned to technology to overcome these challenges. From renewable energy to sensors and data analytics to cutting-edge engineering and hardware, cities are adopting a range of high-tech solutions to position themselves as ‘smart’ and sustainable.
Eco-Business takes a look at how three of Asia’s smartest urban areas are harnessing technology to future-proof themselves.
1. Shioashiya, Japan: A net-zero energy town
Tucked away in a corner of Ashiya city in Japan’s Hyogo prefecture, Shioashiya is a town designed and developed by PanaHome, a subsidiary housing company of Japanese electronics giant Panasonic.
Shioashiya, which houses 400 detached houses as well as an 83-unit condominium complex, is PanaHome’s first attempt to develop a smart city as an independent project. But this has not stopped it from setting the ambitious aim of wanting to be a net zero energy city.
Launched in 2012, Shioashiya spans about 120,000 square metres, and is designed to accommodate 9,000 people; every house and community facility, as well as the overall town layout, has been designed to reduce energy use and maximise opportunities to use renewable power.
Each house in Shioashiya is fitted with rooftop solar panels, energy storage batteries, and a home energy management system which uses renewable energy when possible, and enables excess energy to be shared with neighbouring homes. It also turns off household appliances when they are not in use.
The architecture of the detached houses is also geared towards energy reduction. An insulation technology known as Puretech and an Eco-Navi ventilation system keep the house warm during the summer and cool during the winter, with minimum energy required to do so.
PanaHome has also made the condominium complex in Shioashiya net zero-energy through the use of a rooftop solar power system, and fuel cell units installed in each apartment. A fuel cell is a power generator which produces electricity from a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen and it is widely hailed as a cleaner form of energy generation than conventional fossil fuel sources.
Thanks to its innovative energy generation infrastructure, the condominium complex generates about 199 megawatt hours of energy per year. This exceeds the entire estate’s energy consumption and the power that is sold back to the grid generates some US$11,700 of annual income for the management association, says PanaHome.
Beyond its residences, the town’s community centre, known as the Solar-Shima Terrace, is also fitted out with a solar system and storage batteries, and the town’s layout itself also helps minimise energy use.
This is because it uses an architectural technique known as passive design to make the most of ambient wind, sunlight, and wind — which is abundant, as Shioashiya is located between a sea and mountains — to cool, ventilate, and illuminate buildings in the town.
“PanaHome solutions such as zero-energy houses, smart home energy management systems and new energy have the potential to help Japan achieve its energy and emissions reductions targets, while offering residents a sustainable, vibrant and holistic community to live in,” says Kazuhiko Tanaka, managing director of PanaHome Asia Pacific.
“The technologies showcased in Shioashiya are ideal for scaling up across Japan, and for other Asian countries which are pursuing greater energy efficiency in their cities and buildings,” Tanaka adds.
2. Songdo, Korea: Not a garbage truck in sight
For most urban residents, the unpleasant whiff of a passing garbage truck is part and parcel of city living. But visitors to Songdo International Business District in South Korea will quickly notice that there are no waste collection vehicles plying the streets.
This is because the smart city — a 600-hectare expanse of urban area built from scratch on reclaimed land as a private real estate development project — has a waste collection system using pneumatic tubes. Any trash that is thrown into a bin at home or on the street is transported directly to a central sorting and disposal facility, where it is recycled or incinerated.
Thanks to this efficient and convenient waste collection system — it automatically sorts the waste that enters the facility, and reportedly needs just seven employees to operate — Songdo expects to recycle 76 per cent of its waste by 2020.
Seoul, in comparison, recycled about 46 per cent of its waste in 2013 and aims to raise this figure to to 66 per cent by 2030.
Songdo’s pneumatic, automated waste management infrastructure is powered by a high-speed data network infrastructure and it is just one of the many features that have earned the US$40 billion development the accolade of the smartest city in the world, as well as one of the most sustainable.
Other smart features in this city — which was developed as a joint venture between the City of Incheon, New-York based developer Gale International, Korean steel multinational POSCO, and Morgan Stanley Real Estate — include numerous charging stations for electric vehicles, sensor-based traffic control services, and city-wide security surveillance to keep citizens safe.
Although the city is still under construction, it is already habitable. While only 40,000 residents live in Songdo today, it is already home to about 2,600 businesses as well as several United Nations agencies. When it is completed in 2020, Songdo International Business District expects to house 65,000 people.
3. Singapore: Billion dollar smart technology hub
Smart technology undoubtedly has the potential to make cities more sustainable; but if done right, it can also bolster a country’s economy and create new opportunities for entrepreneurs and attracting international investment.
Singapore, for example, has used its ambition to become the world’s first Smart Nation as a springboard for positioning itself as Asia Pacific’s hub for entrepreneurship and innovation.
To do this, the city-state has invited firms from around the world to use Singapore as a “living lab” to test and commercialise new technology solutions, and has in the last 10 years invested more than US$22 billion in research and development efforts.
Singapore’s government was also instrumental in developing JTC LaunchPad @ one-north, a community for start-up companies in the island’s Ayer Rajah neighbourhood. The complex houses about 500 start-ups and 2,000 employees across a range of sectors including electronics, information and communication technologies, biomedical sciences, and the media.
Dubbed ‘the world’s most tightly packed entrepreneurial ecosystem’ by The Economist Magazine, Launchpad is home to prototyping labs, business accelerators and venture capital firms as well.
Thanks to Singapore’s investment in its Smart Nation Vision, as well as its global reputation for being an easy country to do business in, the number of start-ups in the city-state increased from 24,000 to 55,000 between 2005 and 2015.
According to the Asian Venture Capital Journal Research, Singapore-based technology businesses also attracted US$1.7 billion venture capital in 2013, putting the country ahead of its other Asian counterparts including Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong.
Singapore’s investment in boosting its start-up ecosystem has also been instrumental in attracting foreign companies to establish regional headquarters here.
Among these is American customer service firm Zendesk, which in 2014 acquired a local start-up Zopim and decided to make Singapore its Asia Pacific headquarters shortly after that.
As Mikkel Svane, Zendesk’s founder and chief executive puts it: “Singapore is the perfect gateway to the entire Asia-Pacific region. It serves as the regional home to so many global companies and a hotbed of emerging local businesses and start-ups.”
Title : Interest in energy storage is growing, but projects face a thicket of legal questions
Medium : Business Green
Date : 6 October 2016
Interest in energy storage is growing, but projects face a thicket of legal questions
Interest in the potential development of new storage installations, particularly battery storage, has seen a huge upturn over the last 12 months.
A number of different models are being looked at including domestic scale installations; storage installed 'behind the meter' for industrial and commercial consumers of electricity; and 'stand-alone' utility scale systems designed to provide capacity and/or balancing services to grid operators.
However, there is a fourth model, which this article will focus on. This is when energy storage is located with an existing or planned renewable energy project and electrically connected to the renewable energy facility.
This particular form of 'co-location' differs from what is effectively a 'stand-alone' storage project where a battery may be located on or near to the site of a renewables facility, but there is no electrical connection between the two projects.
What's the benefit?
Depending on the characteristics of a particular renewables project, there may be several obvious benefits to co-locating storage with renewables.
Where a project operates in an area with grid constraints, the ability to shift and smooth peaks of generation to other times of the day when sufficient capacity is available, may increase the total amount of electricity that can be generated.
For solar parks in particular, the ability to shift power generated during the brightest daylight hours to later periods of the day also allows the operator to secure higher prices for electricity. This could potentially access certain valuable embedded benefits, such as triad avoidance benefits, which are usually restricted to other types of generation that are capable of operating at periods of peak demand.
But in the current market these benefits alone may be insufficient to build a robust business case for investing in the additional cost of the storage.
To improve the likely return on investment it may also be necessary to exploit the opportunity for the storage to provide other services that a stand-alone project is able to provide. This means seeking to obtain, either directly or via an aggregator, revenue from a grid operator for frequency response or other grid support services.
This approach will require very careful modelling of the different 'layers' or 'stacks' of revenue in order to identify the services that will create most value at different times of the day or different times of the year.
This in turn may affect the choice of battery or other storage technology as consideration will need to be given to:
•its maximum capacity;
•the maximum duration over which it can operate at that capacity; and
•the likely level of degradation depending on the number of charging cycles it is required to perform over a given period.
It may also be necessary to consider the costs associated with charging the storage from the grid at certain times, rather than from the renewables facility. Under the current regulatory regime the full range of grid charges and subsidy costs that make-up the usual 'delivered' price of grid electricity will be payable on the full amount of electricity taken by the storage from the grid; not just the amount lost as part of the 'round trip' prior to being re-exported.
What are the legal issues?
Even where the economics of a potential model do appear to work, there are a number of legal issues that need to be taken into account. There are those that may be applicable to any co-located project, and those that only apply where the storage and the renewables are structured legally to be owned and operated by separate companies.
Property Rights - where the relevant lease, or option agreement, was put in place in anticipation of a renewables project only; is the use permitted by the lease terms broad enough to allow for the installation and operation of storage as well? Will a variation need to be agreed with the landlord?
Will the area that is demised to the developer for their exclusive possession be large enough to also accommodate the storage facility or will a separate lease be required? Has the existing installation been mortgaged to a lender - if so, their consent will be required? If separate developers operate the existing and new installations then it may also be the case that the developer's consent is required.
Planning - will any existing planning permission cover the installation and operation of the storage? Or will an application need to be made for varied or new consent?
Grid Connection - is the connection of storage permitted under the terms of the existing grid connection offer or grid connection agreement? Will an application need to be made to the DNO for an increased level of import and/or export capacity to accommodate the likely operating pattern of the storage alongside the renewables?
FIT/RO Accreditation - what is the proposed metering configuration for the storage, relative to the renewables facility? How will this enable any electricity imported from the grid to the storage to be identified and disregarded for the purposes of any claim for FIT payments or ROCs when re-exported?
On RO projects in particular, the lack of certainty around how Ofgem would treat any particular co-located project is a cause for concern. It may be a particular challenge when seeking to retrofit storage to any existing, third party financed renewables project.
PPA - what changes will need to be made to any proposed or existing PPA to allow for the storage? PPA providers will be used to predicting output from projects for their own balancing purposes by reference to weather forecasts and notifications from the project company as to any planned or unplanned outages affecting the renewables project. But the introduction of storage means a different forecasting and/or pricing model may have to be applied.
Revenue sharing - on what basis will the total 'pot' of value be shared between the storage project and the renewables project? Some of the value, arising from shifting of generation to other times of the day, will accrue to the renewables company via its PPA arrangements. The value associated with provision of balancing or other grid services will likely accrue to the storage company.
How each company will account to the other for any agreed share of a particular value stream, and what commitments each will make to the other as to these value streams, will need careful thought.
Grid sharing - as the storage project will likely be making use of the grid connection 'owned' by the renewables project, how will potential risks and liabilities arising from shared use of the connection be allocated between the two companies, to the satisfaction of their respective funders?
Each project company will want to ensure that use of the shared connection by the other does not result in interference to its own operations. Many of the issues encountered in other grid sharing contexts, such as private wire PPA arrangements, will have to be worked through.
Climate Change
Title : What’s Holding Russia Back from Ratifying the Paris Climate Agreement
Medium : Energy Collective
Date : 6 October 2016
What’s Holding Russia Back from Ratifying the Paris Climate Agreement
Now that India and the EU this week ratified the Paris Agreement, the Agreement looks very likely to become legally binding by the end of the year. But one important player is still missing. Russia, the world’s fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter is unlikely to ratify by the end of the year.
Following a special climate event at the 2016 United Nations General Assembly, Alexander Bedtritsky, special adviser on climate to Vladimir Putin, confirmed that “Russia will not artificially speed up the ratification process”.
Russian representatives have said they need more time to evaluate the effects of the Paris agreement on the Russian economy, which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. The government wants to draft a low-carbon development strategybefore deciding to ratify.
So far, the plan is to work out an analysis of the socio-economic effects of the ratification by mid-December, and to later draft a strategy for low-carbon development. No certain deadline for ratification, which is due to take place by passing a corresponding legal act within Russia, has been set.