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900+ 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 Levelised cost of energy $/MWh 1kW 10kW 100kW 1MW 10MW 100MW 1GW UPS power quality T&D grid support load shifting Bulk power management Li-Ion battery Lead-acid battery Vanadium flow batteries Flywheels NaNiCI2 battery NaS battery CuZn bi-metal battery, FeCr CAES underground CAES Pumped hydro Cumulus System power rating, module size 22 | 4TH - 10TH DECEMBER 2015 | UTILITY WEEK Game changer /Technology/Innovation Back to the future Cumulus has turned to a battery design first used 200 years ago to create a grid-scale storage solution that it says will achieve the Holy Grail of being both affordable and reliable. Jane Gray reports. Operations & Assets "When you start talking about big bulk time-shift as opposed to frequency response and ancillary services, apart from pumped hydro there is no low-cost solution out there for the 4-6 hour charge and discharge, security of supply market." Nick Kitchin, chief executive, Cumulus Energy Storage L ike all the trendiest technology companies, Cumu- lus Energy Storage, a start-up energy storage pro- vider with headquarters in Sheffield, was conceived in Silicon Valley. In the spring of 2012, engineer and business change expert Nick Kitchin visited the cradle of the technology revolution on a fact-finding and inspiration mission. He also found time to catch up with an old friend, Darren Brackenbury – now chief operating officer at Cumulus – to discuss how best to exploit opportunities in the sup- ply chain for the burgeoning UK offshore wind market Kitchin had been inspired by the "big numbers" asso- ciated with UK ambitions in this sector at an event in Humberside. Rejecting opportunities for novel turbine blades and foundations, the pair agreed that energy storage was the missing link in the sector's value proposition. Bracken- bury, who had experience in battery development, sug- gested a focus on copper-zinc technology, and Cumulus was born. Since Kitchin and his partner took that leap, demand for new and more affordable ways to store the electric- ity from intermittent renewable generation schemes has expanded exponentially. As deployment of renewables has increased around the globe, so awareness of the challenges this brings for grid stability and security has risen. This in turn has spurred the development of demand-response markets and the high price of buying electricity at sensitive times – such as the "triad" periods – has become so punitive that electricity-intensive users are more than happy to engage with partners that can help them avoid those costs. In short, there are opportunities for an entrepreneur- ial company with a sound electricity storage technology to provide "storage as a service" and deliver a variety of win-win scenarios for a range of customers. The technology Kitchin and Brackenbury's decision to focus on a copper- zinc battery innovation might seem a strange one when so much of the wider battery development world has set its sights on developing ever more energy-dense and lightweight lithium ion batteries for use in consumer and mobile devices. But Kitchin says this technology direc- tion is "irrelevant to stationary battery storage". The copper-zinc chemistry, based on proven tech- nology used in the mining industry for years, reinvents one of the first batteries ever made, by Allesandro Volta about 200 years ago. The critical development of this seminal design is that, thanks to modern materials Source: DOE/Epri/Cumulus