Prime Movers Lab Webinar Series: Large-scale Energy Storage

A conversation about big energy and how to store it; exploring the macrotrends that will shape our energy landscape.

Featuring Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Futurist Ramez Naam and Energy Vault CEO Robert Piconi.

The topic today is large-scale energy storage. This is also sometimes called grid-scale, utility-scale or stationary storage. What we really mean by these terms is that these technologies are capable of storing energy in the range of tens or hundreds of megawatt-hours. Grid-scale doesn’t necessarily mean it will be tied to the grid, just that it is capable of storing and supplying enough energy to power a city or big industrial plant for several hours or even days. And being so large, it -probably- isn’t going to be portable, hence the stationary part. This is important is because this will enable the continued rollout of renewables, which have intermittency issues, in that they don’t always generate electricity in a predictable way or when we need it most. These massive energy storage systems can smooth out the power delivery patterns from these renewable generation sources such as wind and solar, making them more viable across larger geographical ranges.

And the truth is, there is energy all around us. Electricity is only one form of energy, though it’s the one we are most familiar with, and probably our most versatile type. And there are many ways to store that energy, but rarely is it stored directly as electricity (supercapacitors and superconductors come to mind as some of the only ways to store electricity directly). Lithium ion batteries use chemical reactions to store energy, which is then converted to electricity through the forced flow of electrons. The food we eat is also stored chemical energy, making the grocery store a non-obvious large-scale energy storage device (though not the kind we are talking about today). But we are here today to talk about more conventional means of storing energy. You can store potential energy by lifting heavy things uphill, and letting them fall or roll back down when you want the power back. Believe it or not, over 95% of all of the energy stored on Earth today is done with what’s called Pumped Hydro where you pump water uphill into a reservoir when power is cheap, and then let it flow back down through a turbine when energy is expensive and you want to sell it back to the grid. Pumped hydro is a form of gravitational energy storage. And as Rob Piconi from Energy Vault will share with us today, there are other ways we can harness gravity for this purpose. We can also store energy as heat in molten salt reactors, or as kinetic motion using flywheels. Even something as simple as compressed air is a energy storage technology that is being explored, where excess power is used to run air compressors to fill massive underground cavities, and the air is released to generate electricity when it is needed.

There are any number of ways to generate and store energy. The real trick is to determine which ones are likely to be economically viable in the long term. This is what we are here today to explore with our expert panelists.

[Click the link above to play the video]

Expert Panelists:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper

For nearly a decade The Right Honourable Stephen J. Harper led Canada through the world’s most complex geopolitical, economic and security challenges as the country’s 22nd Prime Minister. He created the modern Conservative Party of Canada, won three successive national elections, and was the longest serving Conservative Prime Minister since Canada’s founding
Prime Minister in 1891. Since leaving office in 2016, Mr. Harper founded and is Chairman and CEO of Harper & Associates, a global strategic advisory firm. He is also the recent author of “Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption”, and a frequent speaker on geopolitical trends, populism, and business. Mr. Harper also Chairs the International Democrat Union, the global alliance of conservative political parties, and the Friends of Israel Initiative, a global association of former high-office holders who defend Israel’s right to self-determination, security and democracy.

Ramez Naam

Ramez Naam has spent much of the last twenty years giving voice to the futurist movement as a masterful researcher, speaker, and award winning author. He serves as Adjunct-Professor and Co-Chair for Energy and Environment at Singularity University, and speaks around the world about clean energy technologies. Ramez has written five books, including the non-fiction titles The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet and More than Human: Embracing the Promises of Biological Enhancement, along with his well known near-future science-fiction novels Nexus, Crux, and Apex. In addition to writing, Ramez also applies his macrotrend research to investing, where he has contributed to numerous startups working in the areas of sustainable energy, energy storage, and AI; and has further participated as advisor to multiple fortune 500 companies.

Robert Piconi

Robert Piconi is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Energy Vault, responsible for the overall vision, strategic direction and operational performance of the company. Robert’s experience includes prior Executive leadership roles in Fortune 100 public companies across various industries including Diversified Energy (Amoco/British Petroleum), Telecommunications (Bell Labs Lucent Technologies), and Security/Network Management Software (Danaher Corporation). Within the private sector, he also founded and developed several innovative Healthcare service and medical device companies within the European market which were later acquired by Private Equity funds and/or large industry conglomerates. Robert completed his BS/BBA undergraduate studies at the University of Notre Dame and his graduate MBA studies at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management

A Few Sample Takeaways:

Why is this important?

• The cost of solar has plunged in recent years. The prices for renewable energy sources are now irresistible. But they often have intermittency issues due to weather and seasonality. The sun only shines during the day, and even less in the winter seasons. Wind doesn’t always blow, and has seasonal variation too.
• The problem of intermittency is still enormous. In order to get the most from these renewable sources we must build storage into the system to smooth out these fluctuations.
• Grid security and continuity of power are other important reasons to build grid storage. The power grid is more vulnerable than we realize.

What is the difference between long-duration and short duration energy-storage, and how do the economics change with longer duration?

• Many of the intermittency issues can be solved by having 4 hours of storage to do peak shifting, to help smooth out the time period between peak generation (during the day) to peak usage (late afternoon and evening). And having enough storage to last all night solves even more of these problems.
• Lithium-ion batteries are a workable solution for this short duration storage, though they are still expensive compared to other methods and are only a partial solution to the overall problem.
• There are significant seasonal variations to these renewable sources, so it can be advantageous to have ways to store power for weeks or even months if needed. It’s possible to have a wind-drought where the wind doesn’t blow for multiple days. So it would be nice to have a storage device that could store enough power to run a city during those periods of no wind without need to recharge until the wind starts blowing again.
• However, the longer that you store the power means that you are selling power less often. So the capital cost of the device needs to be proportionally lower, since it has less frequenty opportunity to sell power and make a profit.
• Economics are very important here. Batteries degrade over time, so you have a shorter lifetime to amortize the costs over time.
• Pumped storage hydropower is a good solution where it is available. It’s cheap, but can only be built where the geography allows it. And there is an environmental cost to building these reservoirs.

What is the role of regulation and government on driving these technologies forward. How might our policymakers weigh the trade-offs here?

• Europe is leading the world on policy and regulation to drive these clean energy technologies forward. But the US is still where the biggest private-sector investments are being made. There are not really much in the way of tax incentive in the US to aid the adoption of these technologies, so there is an opportunity for future US policy makers to put more favorable conditions in place.
• Perhaps the best way forward here is to drive toward good long term economics. Gov’t should be a co-investor in these promising technologies. In the end what justifies an investment is the possibility to make money from it. If gov’t is going to put billions of dollars into something, they should expect to make some kind of a return on that.
• Carbon emissions are only one of many environmental concerns that must be addressed. There is an enormous environmental impact to pumped hydropower reservoirs. Lithium has environmental challenges of their own in the form of toxicity and the mining of conflict metals. Gov’t has to balance the environmental impacts from all of these sources.
• A lot of the innovation to drive these issues comes from the private sector. Private enterprises are often going to make decisions based on core economics. However, there is beginning to be significant movement in the private sector asking for more socially/environmentally responsible energy solutions. Private sector is interested in solutions that won’t end up with an environmental liability down the road. There are some private companies really beginning to lead the charge here. They would like to be able to say “All of the energy we use is clean energy”.
• We need to make clean energy so darn cheap that there is no real choice in the matter. Economics will drive progress. Governments can have big influence here by offering economic incentives.
• Gov’t programs like ARPA-E help fund some of these big innovations by derisking much of the fundamental science, which brings it closer to a point where it is ready for commercialization. But these programs are still quite small. Govt could play a much larger role in innovation by increasing the funding to these programs. There needs to be someone funding the early science risk, where private capital might not yet be a good fit.
• Scaling of technologies induces private sector R&D and drives down prices. Every technology has a price reduction curve that is dependent on scaling.
• Follow-up article by Ramez Naam: How to decarbonize America — and the world

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.

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