Julian Spector
December 30, 2019
Following long-duration storage
is like rooting for a home team that’s always about to win next year.
Lithium-ion batteries utterly dominate grid
storage deployments these days. That’s great for the cost decline narrative, in
the way that cheap Chinese photovoltaic cells produced a massive expansion in
solar deployments. But cost obsession results in technology lock-in, boxing out
other tools that could prove useful or even better if given the time and space
to grow.
It also makes for homogeneous
storylines: In other news, the latest energy
storage plant looks and performs exactly like all the other ones; check back as
this story develops.
There are good reasons to root for the
scrappy upstarts challenging the conventional wisdom and building alternative
technologies to store clean energy for days, as will be needed for
renewables-heavy grids. But the last decade has seen the long-duration storage
field make outlandish promises and instead deliver bankruptcies or a
slow-rolled smattering of small demos.
For the rest of the story visit: 5 Tangible Advances Long duration Storage 2019