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March 18th, 2019 by Sponsored Content

By Steve Hanley

Energy storage in the United States is expected to triple in 2019 according to Climate Action. That makes for a great headline, but what does it mean? Let’s begin by defining what energy storage is and why it’s important.


Electricity is an enigma. We know what it can do, we know how to make it, we know how to control it, but there is not one person living today who can tell us what it is. Some scientists think it is a wave, some think it is made up of tiny particles, some think it is both.

What we do know is that unless it is stored in some fashion, it must be used as soon as it is created or it will be wasted. The oldest method of storing electricity is called pumped hydro. Here’s how it works.


Pumped Hydro

Excess electricity is used to pump a large quantity of water uphill into a holding pond. Later, the water is allowed to flow downhill to a reservoir below, spinning turbine blades to generate electricity along the way.

The process is about as high tech as a brick but it is simple and effective. It does require a lot of open territory with great deal of elevation change, so it is not suitable for use in many parts of the world.


Other Energy Storage Techniques

There are many other ways to store electricity ranging from the dead simple to the extremely complex. A California company proposes to build a railroad to nowhere. A train of electrically powered boxcars filled with cement would churn their way uphill in the day time using excess electrical energy. At night when the supply of solar power decreases, the train would roll back downhill. At that point, the electric motors that pushed it uphill during the day would reverse their role and generate electricity on the way down.

Other ideas include a tower that stacks concrete filled barrels on an elevated platform during the day. Later, lowering them back to ground level would generate more electricity.

Both systems use sound scientific principles that convert energy into work and then later reverse the process to make more electricity. Despite being possible, neither has shown itself to be price competitive with battery storage.

Concentrated solar power plants do not harvest the light of the sun. Instead, the capture the heat contained in sunlight and use it to warm a storage medium such as salt or silicon. Later, that heat is used to heat water to make steam that drives conventional generators that make electricity.

One experimental system heats silicon until it glows white hot. That light is then used to create electricity using solar panels. Once again, the so-called “sun in a box” concept is physically possible but not yet price competitive with battery storage.


Battery Storage

The most common form of electrical storage today is lithium ion batteries. While they may feature several different battery chemistries, they are essentially the same as the battery cells used in electric vehicles.

The driving factor that makes this type of storage preferred is that the cost of lithium ion battery cells continues to decrease as more and more of them are manufactured.

Another type of energy storage is known as a flow battery. It features two large tanks separated by a membrane. One liquid has a positive charge, the other a negative charge, Flow batteries have one advantage over lithium ion batteries — to add more capacity, simply make the tanks larger.

China is pushing forward with plans to install more flow batteries but in the US, lithium ion batteries are the storage medium of choice largely because they are the least expensive choice.


US Energy Storage Booming 


A new report from the Energy Storage Association and GTM Research says battery storage in the US grew by 27% in 2018 with 431 megawatt-hours installed.

But here’s where things get interesting. ESA and GTM Research predict 2019 will see triple that amount installed — 1,233 megawatt-hours with a combined value of more than $1 billion.

Things get even better from there. By 2023, they expect the US market for battery storage to soar to $3.8 billion helped by “falling costs and favorable policies” on the state level, according to Ravi Manghani at GTM Research.

Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of ESA says “policies and regulatory frameworks that level the playing field will further encourage energy storage deployment throughout 2018 and beyond as the industry builds toward a goal of realizing 35 GW by 2025.”

 
Time Shifting

What makes battery storage so valuable is its ability to save electricity generated now to be used later. That’s a big deal because solar panels work best during the day but begin to lose power as the sun sets — just when people are getting home from work and starting turning on appliances like air conditioning and electronic devices.

If if were not for batteries, much of that solar energy would be wasted. The same goes for wind power. Often wind turbines generate more electricity than needed at some times of day. With batteries, that excess energy can be stored for use later.


Frequency Stabilization

Another important characteristic of battery storage is the ability to react in milliseconds to the tiny variations in the frequency of the electricity flowing through the electrical grid. In most of the US, the electricity supplied by utility companies oscillates 60 times a second.

Motors, computers, and other digital devices can be damaged if the frequency is allowed to vary by as little as 1%. Batteries can absorb excess frequency changes or supplement the grid if the frequency drops too low.


Falling Prices For Energy Storage

The cost of battery storage is accelerating the demand for battery storage. And that is driving a sea change in the utility industry. Unthinkable just a few years ago, building new wind and solar farms coupled with battery storage is now less expensive than constructing new generating facilities powered by natural gas. They are also less expensive that continuing to operate nuclear or coal powered plants.

In the utility industry, investments often take 3 to 4 decades to pay off. The idea of closing down existing facilities in favor of new renewable plus storage options means trillions of dollars in existing investments are at risk. No wonder there is strong resistance to renewables plus storage by some utility companies anxious to protect their existing 🦕🦖 facilities.

But price will win out and the lower the price of renewables plus storage gets, the sooner those existing 🦕🦖 facilities will be retired whether is is convenient for their owners or not. 

This article is supported by InterSolar. Intersolar North America, North America’s premier exhibition and conference, is the perfect place to explore the megatrends driving the solar industry first. It’s the industry hotspot to discover the latest trends in photovoltaics, PV production technologies and solar heating and cooling. Co-located with ees North America, Intersolar North America sit at the cross-section of solar technology, energy storage, and smart renewable energy.

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/18/energy-storage-2019/

Agelbert NOTE: The comments section to the above article is quite lively.   Some advocates of Hydrogen gas storage weighed in. Some fossil fuelers weighed in claiming "natural" (LOL!) fracked gas stored in caverns or whatever is "cheaper" than pumped hydro storage. That's a bold face lie simply because it fails to ADD to the costs of Fracked CH4 the subsidies we-the-people are coerced out of AND the pollution costs we-the-people get stuck with. All those costs are ABSENT with pumped storage.

As to Renewable Energy generated Hydrogen gas storage, though it is not polluting, it is not economically feasable on a large scale (which is how Renewable Energy energy storage MUST be scaled for a 100% plus Renwable Energy powered civilization), for reasons I outlined in a comment I made (see below).

freedomev > Matthew Young
No they haven't stored H2 underground. Why?
Please show examples?
And yes so much NG seeps away it's HG effect is as bad as coal.
And H2 is 100x smaller and even seeps through steel.
And why do you think there is no natural H2?
Because it is very reactive and bonds with many things. Thus why there is NG but no natural H2.
The H2 either became methane/HCs, water or rock.

Ed Golla > freedomev
Hydrogen is not very reactive at all at ambient temperatures. There is natural Hydrogen in the atmosphere. Of course it is only about 1/2 part per million. Hydrogen is not in the atmosphere to any great extent because it speed is so great that it is able to escape from the earth's gravity at the upper limits of the earth's atmosphere.

agelbert > Ed Golla

The reactivity of Hydrogen gas is not the main issue with the effective storage of hydrogen gas as a form of energy for quick use.

The main issue is that Hydrogen gas molecules are smaller than any molecules in the container they are stored in (unless you can lower the temperature so much that the H2 becomes liquid - which uses enormous amounts of energy to do).

At ambient temperatures, the Hydrogen gas will percolate through metal or salt or even the densest of soils. Metal containers (see Nuclear power plant Tritium woes) degrade from Hydrogen gas caused embrittlement within a few years.

Pumped storage is, at present, the cheapest and most reliable method of storing electrical energy.

If the following type of system I learned about (in a January 18, 2018 Spiegel article) was adopted worldwide, the 100% Renewable Energy economy, including transportation, would quickly become a reality:
 
German company plans large-scale power storage using massive rock block

Hydrogen gas, in liquid form, is the best type of rocket fuel. It has the highest energy density of any rocket fuel, but it can never compete with pumped storage for infrastructure energy demands.

Much progress is being made. Battery banks like the one Tesla is marketing will have their place in the 100% Renewable Energy economy, although I believe pumped storage, with giant rock pistons over a giant cylinder of water underground, as shown above, will be more prevalent. We need fossil fuels like a dog needs ticks, no matter what the denier naysayers say.

Here's a nice video one fellow posted showing Amory Lovins exploding Fossil Fuel Industry and Nuclear Power Industry Propagated Baloney (i.e. Myths - Amory is always polite ) AND showing how quickly battery costs are going down.


Amory Lovins on Energy Efficiency Breakthroughs (real world 90% plus waste reduction) that seem hard to believe:

"Only puny secrets need protection; big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."