Giant Batteries Supercharge Wind and Solar Plans
August 11 2019 - 11:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Neanda Salvaterra
A global wave of investment in high-capacity batteries is poised
to transform the market for renewable energy in coming years,
making it more practical and affordable to store wind and solar
power and deploy it when needed.
Government-owned utilities and companies are buying batteries
that can be larger than shipping containers. Some like Tesla Inc.'s
new utility-scale battery can hold enough energy to power every
home in San Francisco for six hours. Battery makers also are
working on more advanced models that will hold more power and last
longer.
In the U.S., the Silicon Valley-based firm introduced its new
battery technology called Megapack last month that Pacific Gas
& Electric Co. plans to use in California. Mitsubishi Hitachi
Power Systems is developing high-capacity batteries for a
1,000-megawatt venture in Utah that it touts as the world's largest
renewable-energy storage project.
In the U.K., ScottishPower is spending $7.2 billion on renewable
energy, grid upgrades and battery storage between 2018 and 2022.
The utility owns Scotland's largest electricity network and
operates in Europe's windiest region, and generates all its power
from renewable sources after selling its last fossil fuel assets in
January.
China's goal is to increase the use of renewable energy and
batteries by 2030 as part of a massive national energy overhaul
aimed at helping to reduce the use of polluting coal-fired power
plants.
And the World Bank Group has set aside $1 billion to invest in
battery projects, including one of the world's largest mixed solar,
wind and storage power plants in India and a battery project in
South Africa anticipated to be the largest of its kind in
sub-Saharan Africa.
"We certainly feel a momentum in the market for batteries," said
Riccardo Puliti, global director for energy at the World Bank.
High-capacity batteries have previously been too expensive for
most energy providers to invest in, which has slowed the growth of
renewable power, according to analysts.
"The lack of cheap and readily available energy storage has been
one of the impediments for wider adoption of renewables," said Ravi
Manghani, director for energy storage at consulting firm Wood
Mackenzie.
But storage-battery prices have dropped nearly 40% since 2015,
according to Wood Mackenzie data. The prices of lithium and
vanadium -- two of several key raw materials that are used in such
batteries -- also have declined over the past year or so.
The batteries have the potential to solve problems that have
hampered the adoption of wind and solar power. The reliability of
those sources can vary when the wind is calm or the sky is cloudy,
and some of the power can go to waste if there is no effective
means to store it.
Such problems have left renewable energy vulnerable to
criticism. "When the wind stops blowing, that's the end of your
electric," President Trump said in March at the Conservative
Political Action Conference.
With high-capacity batteries, utilities can store energy
generated by wind turbines and solar panels and then provide it to
customers when weather conditions are less than ideal or during
periods of high demand.
Some batteries are the size of a refrigerator, while others are
far larger, and utilities generally deploy several at a time. There
are several competing battery technologies. Lithium batteries are
less expensive and the most widely produced, but vanadium-based
batteries have a longer lifespan and can hold more power.
Utilities around the globe deployed a record 6.1 gigawatt hours
of energy-storage capacity in 2018, enough to power about 50,000
households for a day, according to Wood Mackenzie.
That is relatively small, but spending on high-capacity
batteries is set to grow sixfold to $71 billion by 2024, according
to Wood Mackenzie.
In California, Tesla and other firms are delivering batteries
that will replace three aging gas plants. The storage solutions
will provide power to the grid during periods of high demand.
China is already a major user of high-capacity batteries. China
and South Korea deployed more than 40% of the new gigawatt hours
put into service world-wide for stationary energy storage solutions
last year, according to the market intelligence firm IDTechEx.
Meanwhile, the World Bank's battery program is aimed at
providing power to the more than 800 million people world-wide
particularly in parts of Asia and Africa that don't have access to
electricity. The bank expects to raise an additional $4 billion in
private funding to drive ventures such as the partnership with
South Africa's state-owned utility Eskom to develop a 1.44
gigawatt-hour battery.
ScottishPower's investment in batteries is intended to help
prevent some of the wind power it generates from going to waste and
to help balance the electricity supply on the grid. Scotland
produces more wind energy than it can use, and it currently sends
excess production to other parts of the U.K., but some of that
energy is lost because of the lack of storage capacity, according
to the utility ScottishPower.
"Our vision for the future of energy has storage at its core,"
ScottishPower Chief Executive Keith Anderson said.
Write to Neanda Salvaterra at neanda.salvaterra@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 11, 2019 11:14 ET (15:14 GMT)
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