Alternate energy storage will be essential to balancing a cleaner grid. CTVC Sightline Climate Grace Donnelly, Oliver Booth March 31, 2023 To build the new climate economy, we need better information and data. After the commitments and pledges comes the hard work of building the infrastructure we need to achieve net zero. We must rethink and reinvent the way we power ourselves, what we eat, where we live, and how we move. The climate transition is the economic revolution of our generation. We need to innovate our way to solutions then race to deploy them. On paper, it’s easy to build forecasts for decades in the future, where the deployment of climate solutions is up and to the right, and climate technologies like hydrogen, carbon capture, green steel, and battery recycling are ubiquitous. In practice, it’s much harder to build a strategy for the now. Investors, corporates, and governments play key roles building and financing the new climate economy, but they want to be sure they’re making the right decisions for the climate and their stakeholders. They need to have a clear sightline into which new climate sectors and technologies hold real potential and when the inflection points will inevitably happen, as they have for solar and wind.From there came Sightline Climate - a climate-first market intelligence platform that organizes the climate ecosystem, providing tactical research and insights, and bringing clarity to climate.
The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, and there’s certainly no way to ensure that the brightest or breeziest times coincide with periods of peak energy demand. The more intermittent green electrons we produce, the more we need to control when and where those green electrons are distributed in order to keep our homes and businesses humming 24-7. Generally, once grids reach a tipping point of ~60% penetration of wind and solar energy, the capability to shift those green electrons becomes critical. Essentially we can either 1) move electrons further distances or 2) create ways to store them longer. While transmission line upgrades provide cost savings in the long term, initial costs are high and new build of transmission is prohibited by the familiar NIMBYism and permitting challenges. With limited transmission infrastructure, smoothing out the intermittency of renewables requires 12+ hour storage. Technologies able to store energy from ~8hrs up to multiple days or weeks are categorized as long duration energy storage (LDES). Along with enabling a cleaner grid, LDES tech provides greater energy resilience and reliability. The increasing frequency and length of PG&E’s public safety power shutoffs during extreme heat and weather events in California, for example, creates a recurring need for multi-day energy storage—especially in the commercial and industrial sector, where not all customers are considered “essential” but may still have needs like manufacturing or cold storage that can no longer be met economically or sustainably with diesel generator backups.
An energy market overview......The grid and energy markets have a fundamental responsibility: perfectly matching energy generation with demand in a 100% safe manner for all customers, every day, forever. The way that this system is regulated and managed is multi-layered (regulatory commissions, system operators, utilities, and more!) and complex enough for its own deep dive, but at the core are two ways of provisioning and compensating the folks who produce electrons in deregulated systems: capacity markets and energy markets. Capacity markets operate based on long-term models of how much power the grid will need at any given instant under varying conditions in order to meet demand, and contracts are paid ahead of time to energy generators for their ability to deliver that power when needed—typically years in advance. Energy markets are a real-time mechanism of compensating generators for delivering energy to the grid in sync with demand on a daily, hourly, and momentary basis. Since load-serving entities and grid operators have a pretty good idea of how much energy will be needed 24 hours ahead of time, the bulk of transactions pay for the next day’s energy production. More instantaneous energy transactions compensate for small variabilities in grid conditions, as well as “ancillary services,” like making sure that voltage and frequency stay stable at all times.......read on https://www.ctvc.co/ldes-long-duration-energy-storage-tech/