Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!
The United States is rapidly installing grid-scale batteries that are helping to prevent power blackouts, known in German as Dunkelflaute, according to The Guardian. From barely any just a few years ago, the US has now installed 20 GW of grid-scale battery storage for its electric grid — equivalent to twenty 1 MW nuclear power plants. 5 GW of that total occurred in just the first seven months of this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. The EIA predicts total grid-scale battery storage capacity could double again to 40 GW by the end of next year if the new projects already in the pipeline are completed. It also predicts grid-scale storage batteries will provide about 40% of all the world’s short-term electricity needs by 2050.
California and Texas, which both saw all-time highs in battery-discharged grid power this month, are leading the way in this growth, with enormous grid-scale storage batteries helping to manage the large amount of clean but intermittent solar and wind energy those states have added in recent years. The battery systems helped keep the lights on in California this summer, when in previous years the state experienced electricity rationing or blackouts during intense heatwaves when the use of air conditioning soared and power lines were toppled by wildfires. “We can leverage that stored energy and dispatch it when we need it,” Patti Poppe, chief executive of PG&E, California’s largest utility, said last month.
“It’s been extraordinary growth,” said John Moura, director of reliability assessment and performance analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. “It’s still technology that we are getting used to working with because the system wasn’t designed for it, but from a reliability perspective it presents a golden opportunity. This changes the whole paradigm of producing electricity, delivering it and consuming it. Storage gives us a bit of a time machine to deliver it when we need it. There are a lot of changes happening but monstrous action is still needed if we are going to make this energy transition,” he said.
The rapid growth of clean energy such as solar and wind provides more peaks and troughs of production that need to be actively managed in order to maintain a reliable grid. “Batteries can smooth out some of that variability from those times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. The Germans have a word for this sort of drought: Dunkelflaute,” said Moura. “So if you have a four hour storage battery, that can get you through a Dunkelflaute.”
Most grid storage batteries can only supply power back to the grid for about four hours, which creates an opportunity that many companies hope to exploit with longer duration batteries. Much of that technology is still in its infancy. Until they are commercially available, a fully decarbonized grid will require a big increase in long distance transmission lines in the US to transfer renewable energy from where it is produced to where it is needed. The permitting reform to allow this is a bitterly contested issue, with many environmental groups opposed to looser regulations they say will only empower thermal generation from coal or methane.
Putting Second-Life Batteries To Work
In Texas, Element Energy is operating what may be the largest grid-scale storage installation in the US that uses cells from battery EV battery packs that are no longer able to serve as traction batteries. Used batteries are cheaper than new batteries, but making them safe to use is the key to Element’s success. The 53 MWh project is located in West Texas at a wind farm owned by Nextera Energy Resources.
CEO Tony Stratakos told Canary Media recently, “It’s really a very nice, living demonstration that everything we talked about last time has come to fruition and works. The promise of our technology is, we can operate batteries that others can’t.” Previously, the largest second-life grid battery was a B2U Storage Solutions project in Lancaster, California, which has 28 MWh of storage.
Element gained access to a warehouse full of modules taken out of used EV battery packs — Canary Media suspects they may have come from first generation Chevy Bolts — in various states of health. It repackages them into containers operated by its proprietary hardware and software, which fine-tune commands at the cell level instead of treating all the batteries as a monolithic whole. This enables the system to get more use out of each cell without stressing any so much that they break down or cause a fire. The success of the West Texas installation is expected to attract interest from other customers who may have been reluctant to use second-life batteries previously despite their lower cost.
Element has finalized a partnership with LG Energy Solution Vertech, the grid storage division of the South Korean battery manufacturer. It just so happens, LG was the supplier of the original Chevy Bolt batteries. LG will provide operations and maintenance, alleviating the risks associated with buying a long-term grid asset from a young startup like Element. The actual installation process turned out to be “a learning experience,” Stratakos said, meaning it took longer and cost more than initially planned, “but it was worth it,” he said. The company honed its technique for integrating the batteries into large-scale power plants, and improved its enclosure design along the way. Now it is getting real world data from daily plant operations in the ERCOT energy markets.
“There is a lot of talk in this category,” said Tim Woodward, who invested in Element as managing director at Prelude Ventures. This project shows Element can operate at the scale necessary “to get the big guys” — in other words, large, sophisticated clean energy developers. The company is now exploring where to build a factory capable of assembling multiple gigawatt-hours of used battery enclosures per year, Stratakos said. In the meantime, he is working to close a number of deals with the 2 gigawatt-hours of second-life batteries Element has stockpiled in a warehouse in Kentucky. “I don’t think anyone has [a large volume of second-life batteries] sitting there, ready to be deployed,” Woodward said. “Batteries are lasting longer in the field than anticipated. It’s not that common that you’re seeing batteries pulled out of even the earliest Teslas.”
Further success will involve winning over grid storage developers, who currently buy new batteries nearly 100% of the time. The backing from LG will help calm any fears potential customers might have. Second-life startups typically highlight the sustainability aspects of using them to attract first-time customers. Used batteries can reduce the environmental costs of the energy transition and keep valuable battery materials out of landfills. When it comes to actually closing a deal, though, “The number one issue is cost,” Stratakos said. Sustainability and circularity are definitely factors that customers consider, but ultimately that’s “more of a bonus.” Element says it can cut 30 to 50% off the cost on a fully installed basis.
The Takeaway
Last week in Baku, a contingent of Republican representatives were preening and strutting for anyone who would listen about how coal and methane are essential to meet supply baseload power. That is partially accurate, but longer duration grid storage batteries are coming for that baseload power, and what will they have to say then? Storage batteries can do things spinning reserves cannot, such as manage frequency and voltage variations in near real-time fashion. That capability can generate revenue for the battery owners and operators.
As Stratakos says, the number one issue is cost, and when long-term energy storage is cheaper than thermally generated baseload power, that will be all she wrote for coal and methane. Of course, then the fossil fuel fanatics will resort to mandates to stay in business, even though mandates are supposedly anathema to them. Nothing says hypocrisy like people who talk out of both sides of their mouth to preserve their status and revenue streams.
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica’s Comment Policy
