While lithium-ion systems typically provide two to four hours of storage, emerging iron-air technology developed by Massachusetts-based Form Energy promises discharge durations of up to 100 hours. The technology is also enabling microgrids and virtual power plants that combine distributed renewable generation with storage, potentially expanding electricity access in underserved regions, including parts of Africa. BloombergNEF’s Logan Goldie-Scot projects that energy storage could reach the equivalent of 7% of global installed power capacity by 2040.
With the arrival of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery in 1991, the earth shifted for electricity.
Now power could be stored without a weight penalty and other disadvantages of its precursor, the lead-acid battery.
This new rechargeable battery technology could be used for everything, and it has been.
With lithium-ion batteries, things that were only dreamed of by electrical engineers became possible, from cell phones to electric vehicles and storage of home-generated electricity.
For utilities, batteries are smoothing out the power supply. Whereas electric utilities traditionally had to design systems to cover peak demand — usually around sunset and for several hours afterward — now they can store surplus electricity generated at other times of day.
Suddenly every kilowatt of electricity had value, whether it was generated by solar panels at noon or wind turbines at night. With the new batteries, electricity could be harvested and stored.
As often happens, there wasn’t one breakthrough for electricity storage. There has been a flourishing of battery technologies, and many are now finding their way into the electricity market — although lithium-ion is the overwhelmingly dominant technology, others are being adopted.
Particularly of interest to utilities are technologies that extend the all-important drawdown time. For lithium-ion, that is two or four hours. But for one of the newer technologies, iron-air, the drawdown is up to 100 hours. A Massachusetts company, Form Energy, is the leading developer of iron-air technology.
The electricity generators can now store copious quantities of electricity not just in lithium-ion batteries, but also in a variety of new batteries and even non-battery storage systems.
This has been a game-changer. You can now warehouse electricity, a dream come true.
Storage has increased the value of wind and solar power to electricity systems. If the wind chooses to blow at night, so be it. If the sun blazes at midday when there isn’t much demand for electricity, no problem.
Renewable electricity becomes “dispatchable,” the term of art for electricity which is available when it is needed, and key to its value to the utility.
No longer do utilities have to generate enough electricity to cover their peak demand. Now they can even out the flow over the full day.
This ability to store electricity has changed the electricity demand equation. Dispatchable electricity can now be had from batteries rather than gas-fired peaking units or other sources, like diesel generators.
Jigar Shah, a legend in the electric utility space since he directed the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office during the Biden administration, explains the new role of battery-stored electricity as “a paradigm shift.” To Shah, “batteries are the nucleus, solar is the collector.”
He sees batteries as the key to the future of virtual power plants that are the aggregation of diverse generating, have no big central stations, and can either augment an established power system or, as in parts of Africa, can be built to operate with batteries holding the whole system together.
This decentralization, using solar, wind and batteries, is essential to the architecture of micro-grids which are sweeping the United States and the world, and which can range in size from one to 15 single-family homes to a major military base.
Shah recommends using battery storage to help power data centers rather than building new conventional power plants to service the additional loads which are challenging electricity supply.
“We see energy storage growing to a point where it is equivalent to 7 percent of the total installed power capacity globally by 2040,” Logan Goldie-Scot, head of energy storage at Bloomberg NEF, wrote in a report.
Traditionally, utilities have looked to hydroelectric pump storage as the best and cheapest way of storing capacity. But this requires two reservoirs, one low-lying and one on a hill or mountain. There are few sites available where they are needed.
Now storage options are beginning to include such things as heat in sand or magnesium, or using the energy which can be stored in chemical reactions.
But the boisterous new player on the block is battery storage.
Both Pablo Vegas, president of the Texas grid operator, ERCOT, and Elliot Mainzer, president of the California grid operator, Cal-ISO, have said their systems wouldn’t have gotten through recent tough winter periods of supply shortage without batteries.
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