The efforts to adapt electricity generation and the electric grid to the 21st century are multifaceted. The electric grid needs a mix of next-generation low-carbon sources, such as hydro, renewables, and nuclear, including cost-effective carbon capture and ways to smarten the grid.

But battery and storage technologies are struggling to keep up. These technologies are critical to any success in a carbon-constrained world that relies on intermittent sources like solar and wind. This week, it was reported that the Department of Energy has decided to build a multimillion-dollar electric grid research complex at the Northwest National Laboratory. Better yet, bigger batteries are a key component of that research. Jud Virden, PNNL’s laboratory director for energy and the environment, said that it took 40 years for current lithium-ion batteries to reach current technology. “We don’t have 40 years to get to the next level, we need 10 years to do it,” he said.

In addition to batteries, we have other technologies, such as thermal energy storage, to store intermittent energy. This storage technology allows cooling at night and electricity to be stored for use the next day during peak times. Currently, the most widely used storage method is pumped hydro storage, which uses excess electricity to pump water into a reservoir behind the dam. The stored water is then released by electric turbines in the dam when demand for energy is high. Pumped hydro is currently used in 99% of grid storage. However, there are geological and environmental constraints on where the pump can be used.

Lithium-ion batteries can store a lot of energy in a small, lightweight battery, making them the preferred battery for small electronic devices such as laptops and mobile phones. However, Li-ion batteries have problems with short lifespans and rapid heat generation. For the foreseeable future, they will dominate small-volume niches such as personal devices and electric vehicles. However, for the commercially scaled commercial battery market, we need larger systems with longer lifespans. The latest technology to emerge is the vanadium redox battery, also known as the vanadium flow battery. V-flow batteries are fully charged, non-flammable, compact, reusable in semi-infinite cycles, discharge 100% of stored energy, and do not degrade for more than 20 years. The Earth’s crust contains much more vanadium than lithium, and twice as much V as Li is produced each year.

These V-flow batteries can be quite large and are best suited for industrial and utility-scale applications. The Tesla battery is safe for now because it could never fit in an electric car. But the V-flow battery will outshine Li-ion and other solid-state batteries for utility-scale applications. It’s just safer, more scalable, longer-lasting, and cheaper—less than half the cost per kWh. Storing energy in the future will become increasingly important as energy production improves, and we need to be more creative and less costly than ever before. The tools we have—batteries, pumped storage, thermal—we need to deploy them quickly.

Source: “Energy’s Future – Battery and Storage Technologies”, Forbes