The most crucial challenge for clean energy

If you walk around town with a little clean energy swagger (which you should, as it’s a highly competitive form of energy), you’ll eventually encounter some resistance.

“But actually, renewables only work when the sun shines or the wind blows. So you’ll never run the whole economy on that stuff.”

I’m clean energy reporter Julian Spector, and this week on Bright Ideas, I’ll give you an answer to that critique. It’s called energy storage, and it’s the fastest growing part of the clean energy sector right now. It’s also my personal favorite clean energy tool, powerful as Roquefort but versatile as Parmesan. But it has a long way to go before it unlocks a grid powered almost entirely by renewables.

Why we need energy storage

Renewable power takes business from coal and natural gas by costing less. That’s partly due to mass manufacturing: a colossal solar or battery plant is made up of millions of identical cells, which get cheaper as the industry makes more of them—remember what happened to computer chips?

Once built, wind and solar plants cost very little to run. That’s because they don’t require much skilled labor to operate, unlike gas or nuclear plants (flag that as a challenge for that “Green Jobs” narrative). But it’s also because their fuel sources—wind, sunshine—are free.

The necessary flipside to this advantage is that they only work when those free fuels flow, which is not all the time.

Of course, saying solar is bad because it doesn’t work without sunshine is like saying a coal plant is bad because it doesn’t work without coal. That critique better not dive, because it’s too shallow.

The more interesting question is:

Can we build a system where we maximize the benefits of cheap wind and solar when they’re available, and still have emission-free electricity when they’re not around?

The answer for short periods of time is, Absolutely! For long periods of time, much like the effort to keep my houseplants alive, we understand the goal and we’re working on it.

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Please, don’t call it a grail

When I showed up for my first day of work at Greentech Media four years ago, my boss Stephen Lacey gave me one assignment: We’d like you to write about energy storage.

About what?

I had never successfully pitched a story on the topic, because nothing much was happening, besides some people talking breathlessly about Tesla’s new Powerwall. Everything was theoretical: if these dense and arcane market rules change, then energy storage could do the most wonderful things.

The magical and elusive quality of this concept inspired some to call it “the Holy Grail of energy.” I’d caution against that metaphor, because don’t you know how that story ends? Neither the Arthurian legends nor the retelling by Indiana Jones offer much inspiration.

But the pace of growth since then has been nothing short of inspiring. Instead of spending hours digging for something, anything, worth writing, I now have to triage because so many groundbreaking projects happen all at once. Oil and gas companies are slashing investment amid the downturn, but storage companies are signing record-breaking deals.

Electric utilities regularly build large lithium-ion batteries to store electricity when it’s abundant and deliver it when it is scarce. In sunny southwestern states, solar paired with batteries now beats other kinds of power plant in bidding for new contracts. Batteries also kept Southern California groovy when the enormous Aliso Canyon gas leak threatened supply for gas power plants. You can’t just plop a gas-burning plant in a city that needs lots of power; batteries don’t emit fumes, so they can slip in quickly and easily.

The missing piece

The big batteries getting built today typically deliver maximum power for up to four hours; they could be built for longer periods, but that gets expensive.

If we really want to shut down all the fossil fuel plants, though, four hours isn’t enough storage to keep the grid running around the clock. A polar vortex could wipe out wind for several days, or a prolonged storm cycle could dampen solar production. Seasonal shifts from wet to dry pose a longer term challenge. As mentioned previously, you can run a clean grid with enough nuclear, hydropower or geothermal, but without those, you’ll need some form of energy storage that lasts longer than what we have today.

Just last week, I reported a potential breakthrough: startup Form Energy signed its first deal for a device that can deliver its full power over six days. Great River Energy, Minnesota’s second largest power company, bought it to test whether it can ride out several days without wind. That company also decided to close its last big coal plant—it literally tried to give it away, but nobody would take it (!)—and buy a ton of wind power.

Form’s project won’t be finished until 2023. A host of other companies are developing other technologies for what’s called “long duration storage.” They range from pressurized tanks to insulated heat chambers to stacking giant blocks with a robo-crane.

So no, we don’t know exactly what tools will work out for the long term storage role. But nobody needed to figure that out before. Now the need is approaching, and a bunch of smart people are working on it. You have to sniff a bunch of cheeses before you can pick the right one.

Bright Ideas is my new personal project, part of staying sane amid the isolation. If you like what you read here, please share it with a friend or two. We could all use more Bright Ideas in our lives, right?

The Energy Stream

This week, I’ve got tunes for you. The electronic artist Four Tet produced an album in 2017 called, wait for it, New Energy. It weaves acoustic instruments, including some classical Indian sounds, into digital beats in a synthesis that I’ve found beautifully transporting.

It’s in the Brian Eno style of atmospheric sounds that have enough rhythm to keep your body moving, while being mellow enough that you can think about other things at the same time, like the future of energy storage. Plus, New Energies is a synonym for clean energy, as in Royal Dutch Shell’s New Energies division, which installs energy storage, among other things. You can also listen to New Energy and not think about energy storage, if that’s more your thing.