Battery power: the future of grid-scale energy storage

11/28/22 • 34 min

Is the battery revolution here? Or have we already been living in it for three decades?

Renewable energy sources - wind and solar - have become the cheapest and fastest growing form of electricity generation. But the industry has not yet escaped the perennial criticism that keeps many from believing that the world could run entirely on renewable energy: what happens when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing? To date, batteries have not been a particularly convincing answer, due both to their cost and their limited ability to store industrial scale electricity for more than a few hours at a time.

But that might be changing. After more then three decades of remarkable innovation, the price of lithium batteries has dropped 97%, and the power storage potential of a battery has increased 3.4-fold. Nate Blair, who manages the Distributed Systems and Storage Analysis Group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), joined Climate Now to discuss where we are today in developing grid-scale energy storage systems. Stay tuned to find out what role batteries will play in the transition to clean electricity, why lithium batteries are currently leading the way in grid battery storage, and what other technologies we might expect in grid storage portfolio in the next 10-30 years.

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Previous Episode

What is the future of carbon capture technology?

Since its founding in 1952, the mission of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been to meet urgent national security needs through scientific and technological innovation. Expanding from its focus on nuclear weapons science at the height of the Cold War, LLNL has become a national research leader in counterterrorism, intelligence, defense, and energy, with its emphasis in the latter being to advance national energy security while also reducing its impact. And critical to reducing the environmental impact of the national energy sector is determining how to remove historical greenhouse gas emissions (what has already been released) from the atmosphere in parallel with ongoing global decarbonization efforts.

Climate Now’s James Lawler was invited to tour LLNL’s Carbon Capture Lab, home to a team of scientists working to reduce the cost and bottlenecks of implementing large-scale carbon capture facilities, to learn how this research is developed, where the state-of-the-art is in carbon capture technology, and where we could go next (Direct Air Capture skyscrapers?).

#carboncapture

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Next Episode

The role of microgrids in the energy transition

A micro-grid is a local grid. That means that energy generation occurs locally (no giant transmission lines) to support local energy demand, and it has the option to operate independently from a traditional regional power grid. These kinds of grids are attractive because they can take advantage of growing renewable energy infrastructure like rooftop solar, and they can create resiliency against regional grid failures, which are becoming increasingly frequent with the climate change-related uptick of extreme weather events.

But wouldn’t utility companies, whose revenue is generated from conventional grid use, and who control more than 99% of the nation’s electricity supply, use their enormous lobbying weight to prevent the proliferation of microgrids?

Not necessarily, according to Cecilia Klauber, an engineer working on the security and resilience of power system infrastructure at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Cecilia provides a business case for why regional utility companies might want to invest in microgrid infrastructure, and explains how the growing microgrid network across the US will provide energy resiliency and reliability for both energy providers and users. Stay tuned!

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Climate Now - Battery power: the future of grid-scale energy storage

Transcript

James Lawler: [00:00:00] Welcome everyone to Climate Now, a podcast that explores and explains the ideas, technologies, and the practical on the ground solutions that we’ll need to address the global climate crisis and achieve a net zero future. I’m James Lawler, and if you like this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, share it with your friends, or tell us what you think at [email protected].

Today in our interview segment, we’re going