Critical Role to Clean and Sustainable Energy
Energy storage plays a critical role in the transition to a clean and sustainable energy future, tackling the challenges of using intermittent renewable energy sources, improving grid stability and dispatchability, and powering electric vehicles (EVs). Energy storage has the potential to abate up to 17 Gt of CO2 emissions across sectors by 2050, primarily by supporting renewable power and the electrification of transport.
Innovations in battery storage have reduced costs and curtailment issues, enhancing economic competitiveness. However, timely grid infrastructure updates and storage deployment are critical to fully integrate renewables.
Download Energy Storage below to explore innovative technologies, market barriers, and policy levers to accelerate the adoption of these solutions.
Five Key Points
There’s an EV battery tech race underway, and a combination of factors could influence which companies, geographies, and technologies pull out ahead. According to Meng, the battery market for EVs is on track to grow fivefold over the decade ending in 2028, mushrooming from $17 billion in 2019 to about $95 billion. Most of that growth has happened, and will continue to happen, in lithium-ion batteries, which are the most prevalent choice for EVs, thanks to their high energy density and reliability.
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EV batteries have the potential to last decades longer than the vehicles they power, but current market approaches treat them as disposable rather than infrastructure. Experts argue that reimagining batteries as long-term assets is crucial for financing and accelerating the energy transition, despite technological challenges in developing truly long-lasting battery systems.
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When EVs are parked (which is how most cars spend the majority of their time), their energy remains stored, though it often could be better used as part of a distributed utility grid system. As utility grids add more renewable sources like solar and wind power, they need some help balancing their supply with demand. In the middle of the day, for example, solar energy is abundant, but peak demand usually happens at night. Too often, conventional energy sources are called in to smooth out the demand imbalance.
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Meng projects that a future version of the world that relies on clean energy will require between 200 TWh and 300 TWh of lithium-ion battery storage. That is an intimidating figure, she acknowledged, given that so far, the world’s battery industry has achieved only 1 TWh annual production of lithium-ion battery capacity.
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Workshop participant Paul Jacob is CEO of Rye Development, which helps develop utility-scale energy storage projects, with a particular focus on pumped storage hydropower. He shared that as he travels the country and meets with representatives from utilities, he’s increasingly hearing that they’re receiving interconnection requests that exceed the size of their entire utility system because of new AI data centers
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Vehicle-to-Grid Technology and Network Effects
What are the challenges and opportunities that China’s NaaS and Germany’s ELMI Power face as they build network-dependent clean energy infrastructure across different market contexts?
Energy Storage: Five Key Points About Batteries
At a recent gathering of global energy storage experts hosted by Columbia Business School, Dan Steingart, a professor of chemical metallurgy and chemical engineering at Columbia Engineering, recalled that just over two decades ago, his PhD project, to develop a lithium-ion battery that could power buses, was scrapped when the U.S. Department of Energy decreed that such batteries could never be safe enough for large vehicles.