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The future of renewable energy, primarily wind and solar, is intertwined with the development and deployment of energy storage technologies. This Energy Technology Distillate describes the fundamentals of energy storage, including leading technologies and their challenges, key costs, and important regulatory initiatives that are acting to drive commercial deployment.
Power produced from wind and solar has grown quickly over the past decade. Between 2001 and 2011, global wind capacity grew tenfold and solar electricity capacity grew forty-fold. In 2011, the two sources produced 2.4 percent of the total global supply of electricity. However, further integration of wind and solar into the grid will become increasingly difficult because these sources are both intermittent and unpredictable. Unpredictable sources of power present a challenge for the grid: when a customer turns on a light, high-quality electricity must be available to meet the demand.
Energy storage systems offer a possible solution by absorbing electricity from the grid when it is plentiful and providing electricity to the grid at a later time.
Multi-hour energy storage systems could increase the renewable portion of electricity delivered to customers, and thus significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with power generation using fossil fuels. Storage also could help overall grid performance, allow better management of conventional power plants, and provide more options for providing power in emergencies.
Power: how quickly a battery charges and discharges, measured in watts (W). A 100W battery could light a 100W light bulb at full brightness but not drive a 1,500W hairdryer.
As a practical matter, the economic comparison of energy storage to other options currently comes down to the price of natural gas. Gas-fired turbines respond quickly to fluctuations in supply and demand, and are thus an obvious choice for pairing with wind and solar.
Using basic math to factor in both capital and operating costs reveals that the second option is cheapest even when natural gas prices are much higher than they are today. As natural gas prices rise, pairing wind and gas becomes economical; at even higher prices, replacing gas with storage becomes attractive. Adding a carbon tax or other incentives could make storage financially attractive at lower gas prices.
Battery technologies for grid-scale storage can be evaluated by six criteria: power, capacity, cycle life, efficiency, cost, and safety. No current technology excels at all six. With new applications, including electric vehicles and grid-scale storage, addressing trade-offs among these criteria becomes the focus of most battery research.
Lead-acid batteries (such as those found in automobiles to start engines) are low cost and relatively safe but require trade-offs between useful power, useful capacity, and the number of cycles before replacement.
Lithium-ion batteries (found in cell phones) have high power density and high energy density, but would be very expensive at the grid scale because extensive cooling is currently required for safety and long life.
Sodium-sulfur batteries (under development primarily in Japan) achieve high power and long life but are at risk of extreme fires. The costs of monitoring and engineering to operate safely are too high at present to make this option competitive aside from a handful of applications.
Entirely new battery technologies are being developed but so far remain "beaker-scale" experiments. Their characteristics are not established sufficiently to extrapolate their potential performance at grid-scale deployment.
One such approach seeks to maximize the amount of material devoted to storing energy as opposed to providing structural support. This approach uses materials that naturally renew and restructure themselves each time the battery is charged, so that it can be cycled a very large number of times. Another approach to long cycle life seeks materials that incur only minimal disruption during charging and discharging. This second approach lowers costs by making cycling predictable and reducing failure rates.
Some types of variation in the supply and demand of energy are predictable: people''s tendency to use lights in the evening; seasonal patterns of sunlight; standard weather fronts. These can be used to plan energy generation. Energy from wind and solar introduces a much higher level of uncertainty due to unexpected fluctuations.
Taken together such decisions create complex interactions, but provide a powerful hedging mechanism that allows the grid to handle even unpredicted variations as large as a few percent.
However, a wind energy source can quickly drop to zero, and even when wind power from many sources is combined, total electricity from these sources still fluctuates unpredictably. If wind were powering even 20 percent of the grid, new methods would be required to adapt to such volatility.
For individual homeowners and businesses trying to supply their own electricity via solar, the grid acts like a big backup battery. But at high penetration levels, the increased variability places significant stresses on the power electronics and the planning processes.
Even in regions such as Denmark and Spain or Iowa and South Dakota, known for deriving a substantial amount of power from wind, smooth operations require reliance on grid connections to a broader geographic area and other types of power.
Use of fossil fuels is causing a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) at a rate of one percent every two years. Coal and natural gas power plants contribute 40 percent of the world''s CO2 emissions. To what extent could those emissions be eliminated by wind and solar, for some specific region or grid? A substantial literature makes the case that an electricity system powered by 80 percent and even 100 percent renewables is potentially achievable. However, formidable challenges would need to be overcome for such an outcome to emerge.
Second-best, from the standpoint of CO2 emissions, would be a system where energy from natural gas fills in when renewable energy supply falls below grid demand. A grid powered half by carbon-free renewables and half by natural gas would produce one-fourth as much carbon as a system producing the same amount of electricity entirely from coal (since natural gas power on its own emits half as much CO2 as coal power and the use renewable energy, in some guises, entails negligible CO2 emissions). For many, "one-fourth of coal" is too high; for others, it''s a victory.
Emissions from such a hybrid system could be further reduced by as much as 90 percent by adding CO2 capture at the gas-fired plant and storing the CO2 deep underground. But this is probably a mismatch, because the modified natural gas plant would be less nimble and better suited (in terms of technology and economics) for running at constant output.
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