The future of energy storage beyond lithium ion
Energy
Over the past decade, prices for solar panels and wind farms have reached all time lows, leading to hundreds of gigawatts worth of new renewable energy generation. As the saying goes though, the wind isn't always blowing and the sun isn't always shining.If, for example, it's a beautiful sunny day and we've got a super abundance of electricity, we can't use it. The question of how to firm renewables, that is, ensuring there's always energy on demand no matter the time of day or weather, is one of the biggest challenges in the industry. We need a good way to store energy for later. And the main option right now is lithium ion batteries. You see them in products like Tesla's home battery, the Powerwall and utility-scale system, the Powerpack. But though lithium ion is dropping in price, experts say it will remain too expensive for most grid-scale applications. To get to battery for the electrical grid, we need to look at a further cost reduction of 10 to 20x. Right now, lithium ion batteries just can't store more than four hours worth of energy at a price point that would make sense. Plus, they pose a fire risk and their ability to hold a charge fades over time. To address this, there's acadre of entrepreneurs experimenting with a variety of different solutions. Now we're seeing flow batteries, which are liquid batteries, and we're seeing other forms of storage that are not chemical or battery-based storage.And each has serious potential. We looked at materials on the periodic table that were actually going to be cost competitive from day one. Primus Power's flow battery is a workhorse. Thermal energy storage has a pretty unique opportunity to be extremely low cost.Our solution will last 30 plus years without any degradation in that performance.Which technologies prevail remains to be seen. But one thing is clear. For renewables to truly compete with fossil fuels, we need to figure out a better way to store energy. From 2000 to 2018, installed wind power grew from 17,000 megawatts to over 563,000 megawatts. And solar power grew from a mere 1,250 megawatts to485,000 megawatts. And it's not stopping there. Renewables are expected to grow an additional 50 percent over the next five years.We know today that solar P.V. and wind are the least expensive way to generate electricity. In particular, the price of solar photovoltaics has plummeted far faster than all forecasts predicted, after China flooded the market with cheap panels in the late 2000s. All the Wall Street analysts did not believe that solar was going to ever stand on its own without subsidies. Well, a few years later, even the most conservative analysts started realizing that actually solar was going to become economic in most parts of the world pretty quickly. And as solar has gotten cheaper, so too have lithium ion batteries, the technology that powers electric vehicles, our cell phones and laptops. And thanks to improved manufacturing techniques and economies of scale, costs have fallen 85 percent since 2010. Now, wind or solar plus battery storage is oftentimes more economical than peaker plants, that is, power plants that only fire when demand is high. Tesla, for example, built the world's largest lithium ion battery in Australia, pairing it with a wind farm to deliver electricity during peak hours. But this doesn't mean lithium ion is necessarily economical for other grid applications. We don't really see the cost structure coming down to the point where it can serve those tens to hundreds of hours applications. The future of power energy is therefore good .
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Hey, just wanna let you know that this is more suitable to be posted in the FYI community 😊