RENEWABLE ENERGY - Hunt for a Better Battery

"How building a better battery would change the game for renewable energy" PBS NewsHour 12/15/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Wind can be a bountiful resource in Tehachapi, California, but not necessarily at the right time.  There turbines generate the most energy at night, when the wind blows hardest, and the demand is the lowest.  Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports on the wider push for electricity storage solutions that may enable renewables to have a greater impact on the grid.

MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour):  A hundred miles north of Los Angeles, in Tehachapi, California, the wind can be a bountiful resource, but, unfortunately, not at the right time.  It blows hardest at night, spooling up these wind turbines to their peak output, when the demand for electricity is at it lowest.

DOUG KIM, Southern California Edison:  So, matching the output of wind to when customers really need it, that’s certainly one of the things that we’re looking at with this system that you see here, because you can store energy.

MILES O’BRIEN:  Doug Kim is the director of advanced technology for Southern California Edison.  The utility built this eight megawatt lithium-ion battery facility, designed to store electricity generated by the turbines.

DOUG KIM:  We can certainly use this for an example, when the wind blows during the nighttime, capture that energy during the nighttime and then use it during the daytime, when the demand is high.

MILES O’BRIEN:  The batteries, stacked in racks here, are equivalent to about 2,000 electric cars.  It is the start of Edison’s effort to meet a state-mandated requirement to add 580 megawatts of energy storage into the grid by 2020.

It’s part of a big push to invent ways to practically store huge amounts of electricity, so that renewables so can become a more than fringe players on the grid.

DONALD SADOWAY, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:  If we don’t treat the intermittency of renewables, they’re — they’re not really a solution.

MILES O’BRIEN:  Electrochemist Donald Sadoway is a professor at MIT.  He says lithium-ion batteries are not the answer; they pose a serious fire risk, and, as any laptop and cell phone user knows, their performance degrades fast as a speeding Tesla.  In short, they are way too expensive and impractical for widespread usage on the grid.

But what are the alternatives?

DONALD SADOWAY:  The issue is that we don’t have a battery technology that can meet the rigorous performance requirements of the grid, namely, super low-cost and super long service lifetime.