As you may already know, on April 22, 2021, “USA” has “set a goal” to achieve “100% carbon-free electricity by 2035”. You know it because on that day (Earth Day!), President Biden issued Press Release so the announcement, although the document doesn’t tell us how Biden could commit “the United States” to such an ambitious goal by means of a mere press release, without get any kind of affirmative action from Congress, let alone any consultation with you.
Previous articles here have noted that there is a sizable obstacle to achieving the “carbon-free electricity” goal, namely the need to store huge amounts of energy to turn production fluctuating continuously. bounces from wind and sun into 24/7 stable electricity supply. Eg, This post is from January 14, 2022 reports on a man named Ken Gregory’s calculation of how many gigawatt-hours of storage it would take to balance the grid providing adequate wind/solar energy for the United States assuming consumption at 2020 levels. ( Mr. Gregory’s calculations are in the range of 250,000 GWH, at a cost of hundreds of trillions of dollars.) And This post is from March 27 It is reported that various jurisdictions (California, Australia, New York) are moving towards a “net zero” future without ever bothering to calculate how much GWH of stored energy they will need Or how much it will cost.
But clearly those committed to us on these goals must know that a future completely free of wind/solar and fossil fuel-free electricity requires a lot of energy stored in the air. store. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that wind and sun produce nothing on a quiet night. And indeed, if we look at what our government is doing, we see significant activity on the energy storage front. But there is almost no link between, on the one hand, current efforts of small research grants and pilot programs to investigate which new technologies might work, and on the other. , a total of hundreds of trillions of dollars transforming the entire energy economy is expected to be completed within the next 13 years using technology that has not yet been invented let alone demonstrated on a large scale. .
Here are just a few examples of what’s currently going on there in the world of energy storage:
- The federal Department of Energy has a large ongoing program called the Great Energy Storage Challenge. An article from Energy Storage Bulletin, September 24, 2021, provides a comprehensive update. The focus of the program will be on building a new research center where various alternative strategies for what they call “long-term” energy storage will be studied for feasibility. So it looks like they’ve at least figured out that to create a solar/wind power grid that will last a year, you’ll need storage that can hold thousands of GWHs of charge over months. customary. Lithium-ion can’t do that. But ESN notes that not only do “long-term” technologies not yet exist, but also a research center to investigate them does not yet exist, nor has construction begun. From ESN: “DOE is also helping to build a $75 million long-term energy storage research center at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, expected to open before or during 2025. ” So maybe we can start this basic research around 2025.
- And what potential technologies will be investigated? In the same article from ESN, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm emphasized: “Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm famously expressed the view earlier this year that flow batteries “good for grid storage” and these enthusiastic words seem to be turning into action. “ Hey, Secretary Granholm went to Harvard Law School, so that makes her at least as qualified as I am to choose the type of storage the US should buy to store 250,000 GWH of energy for six months. ESN reports that Granholm’s DOE has thus awarded approximately $18 million in grants to four entities that are investigating various aspects of this hypothetical “flow battery”.
- In the somewhat less mythical category, here’s an article from ESN that came out today on the subject of zinc batteries, titled “E-Zinc raises $25 million to begin commercial trial production of long-term storage.” You only need to read a little of this to realize how utterly remote from the necessary capabilities these technologies currently perform. “The [zinc battery] The technology is being touted as a means to replace diesel generating sets in providing backup power for periods ranging from half a day to five days. . . . The ability to discharge at full rated capacity for several days will likely surpass that of other non-lithium alternatives such as flow batteries. . . . However, e-Zinc has not yet passed the testing phase. ” The technology that discharges at full capacity for more than “several days” is not even in the “testing stage”.
None of these papers, or many others from the Department of Energy, will give you many clues as to how much implementing any of these technologies might cost. But doing some searching today, I found a July 2019 document from the Ministry, with the title “Energy Storage Technology and Cost Characteristics Report” written by K. Mongird and a bunch of co-authors. This section attempts to compare costs across a large group of potential energy storage technologies and provides a cost prediction for each by 2025. These technologies are sodium-sulfur, lithium ion, acid. lead, sodium metal halide, zinc hybrid cathode, and redox current. The authors really try to honestly assess the cost, including not only the capital cost to purchase each battery, but also the cost of the power conversion system (conversion from AC to DC and vice versa). , “factory balance”, and “Build and operate.” The cheapest technology in this analysis is lithium ion at $362/kwh, with the difference between that and the lower $200/kwh Tesla is currently charging including conversion costs, BOP and C&C. But keep in mind that lithium ion technology only carries a discharge capacity of about 4 – 8 hours.
The second cheapest here is zinc tech, at $433/kwh. Recall that Mr. Gregory calculated a storage need of approximately 250,000 GWH for the US to back up a solar/wind power system providing current electricity usage. Multiplying by $433/kwh, you get about $108 trillion. If you were going to electrify all your cars, heating and cooking in your home, you could at least double that number. And this is the technology that we hope to demonstrate a 5-day discharge capacity, compared to a need for more than 6-12 months.
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