Excerpt from: A Battery of Choices, August 15th, 2018 by The Beam
By Noah Kittner and Daniel Kammen, University of California Berkeley
Kittner, N., Lill, F., & Kammen, D.M. Energy storage deployment and innovation for the clean energy transition. Nature Energy 2, 17125 (2017). Paper and supplemental data are available online at: http://rael.berkeley.edu/project/innovation-in-energy-storage/
In a world where we depend on sunlight and the wind for most of our energy needs, unless our future electricity system represents a giant “super-grid” with tons of wires connecting everywhere, a place to store that electricity is needed. Battery costs are fast becoming an economic alternative; a
recent study published in Nature Energy1 found that storage prices are falling faster than solar PV or wind technologies at similar points in their cost trajectory. Researchers Daniel Kammen and Noah Kittner modeled various cases of where future combined solar, wind and battery storage systems could go and show how these systems outcompete fossil fuels on the electric power grid.
Utilities often rely on natural gas “peaker” plants to provide backup and maintain grid reliability to prevent possible outages; however, these combustion turbines are often inefficient and dirtier than their combined-cycle gas turbine counterparts. Battery storage could replace those peaker plants and respond to changes in sunlight and wind availability within seconds. Lithium-ion batteries, in particular, are maturing due to their presence and availability in consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and on the grid.
As Tesla moves to install a “Gigafactory” in Nevada and the largest lithium-ion storage battery in the world in South Australia, the innovative combinations of energy storage in terms of size and scale are changing the innovation and investment picture.
The Tesla Powerwall is advertised at around $350/kWh. This is still out of reach for many customers. However, the US Department of Energy set a goal for $100/kWh battery storage by 2020. This is achievable, but investments on the research and development side are critical to enable this transition. We found that progress in lithium-ion batteries has developed from $10,000/kWh in the early 1990s to a fraction of that today. The pace of innovation is staggering.
The falling cost of lithium-ion battery storage by comparing historical prices with one- factor models that incorporate economies of scale and experience and two-factor models that investigate the value of innovation and deployment. The two-factor model estimates the role of learning-by-searching and learning-by-doing.
Berlin plans to install a 120 MW flow battery underground to support wind and solar efforts. California has enacted the first “energy storage mandate” policy on the grid, requiring utilities to procure 1.325 GW of storage by 2020. A diversity of options for storage exists — including, but not limited to lithium-ion batteries. These may include distributed small-scale flywheels on distribution systems to inject short bursts of power in the future combined with vanadium-redox flow batteries providing multi-hour storage with potential to power office buildings during peak demand periods.
There is an important evolution happening in battery storage at this moment; i.e., the combination of innovation in battery storage for electric vehicle use, transitioning transportation fuels to electricity, and grid-scale storage that enables low-cost solar and wind to become ubiquitous across the world, regardless of geography. This happens due to the portability of different scaled storage devices and the new opportunity battery storage provides. We can control battery storage through computer programs and make solar and wind electricity dispatchable. That is, you can turn solar and wind on and off, just like a light switch.
Kittner, N., Lill, F., & Kammen, D.M. Energy storage deployment and innovation for the clean energy transition. Nature Energy 2, 17125 (2017). Paper and supplemental data are available online at: http://rael.berkeley.edu/project/innovation-in-energy-storage/
