It’s Thursday, July 15, and the Department of Energy aims to slash battery costs.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it aims to reduce the cost of grid-scale, long-duration energy storage by 90 percent within the next decade. That mouthful is the technical way of describing batteries that are capable of storing at least 10 hours’ worth of energy and discharging it to the electrical grid when needed — which are essential to Biden’s goal of 100 percent clean electricity by 2035.
Today, the lithium-ion-based, grid-scale batteries being built by companies like LS Power and Tesla can discharge electricity for about 4 hours tops. These systems store excess power and discharge it to smooth out small fluctuations in power supply to the grid. But in order to eventually get most of our power from renewable sources, we’ll need to be able to store much more energy to use when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining for days or weeks at a time.
There are many promising long-duration storage technologies, including new battery chemistries and mechanical and thermal processes, but today they are far too expensive to implement at scale. The Department of Energy’s goal to slash costs is part of its new “Energy Earthshots” initiative to accelerate various emerging clean energy solutions that will enable the U.S. to achieve a net-zero emissions energy system by 2050.
The Smog
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