Energy Storage: Key Enabler for the Deployment of Renewables — A Lecture on Utility-Scale Batteries

As a part of our recent discussion on energy storage, Larry Sobel wrote in, calling my attention to this fabulous lecture given by a brilliant and thoroughly entertaining chemistry professor at MIT, who calls upon his students to think differently and go against the grain with respect to developing solutions for grid-level energy storage. As the professor reminds us, storage is the key enabler for the deployment of renewables to make it to base load, as we need to address their intermittence.

The key point here in thinking differently is refusing to pay for attributes you don’t need, since cost is king here; batteries that were invested portable applications are not scaleable at cost; we cannot string together batteries that were invented for laptops, cell phones, or even electric vehicles. Cell phones need to be idiot proof, and to operate in a temperature range that is comfortable when held in one’s hand. Car batteries need to be crash-worthy.

But stationary batteries for utility scale storage need to have none of these characteristics. So what do you get when you throw away the attributes you don’t care about? I hope you’ll check out the lecture.