Dr. Conca reports that new advances in batteries and storage technologies for electricity may soon solve one of the most vexing issues with wind and solar energy, dealing with their intermittency. The wind and sun generally do not generate power when it is needed, and we have not had efficient ways to store that energy, instead making other power plants, like hydro and gas, ramp up and down to accommodate. Batteries have been our common method to store electricity, but they have always been small, inefficient and costly. Recent advances have produced large mobile batteries in the MW range but they are still costly, a little unsafe, and require lots of specialty elements like lithium and gadolinium, which need to be recovered from brines or from far-away mines.
But storage is making a huge leap in both batteries and gravity-based energy storage. Today, 250 of the world leading energy storage experts have gathered at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the 9th Energy Storage Symposium ... Beyond Lithium Ion. With the PNNL Advanced Battery Facility as backdrop, the group is discussing the latest battery technologies, from gel-batteries, large liquid batteries, sodium sulfur batteries, supercapacitors, membrane batteries, redox flow batteries and new poly-ionics. These breakthroughs are essential to make more efficient and low-cost batteries, which are critical for mobile systems like fully-electric cars, for geographically-remote areas, and when there is a need for emergency response power. Or if you just want to get off of the grid entirely.
But for storing huge amounts of energy, like the amount to power a city for 24 hours, we only have had one technology, pumped-hydro energy storage. With pumped-hydro, excess electricity from renewables is used to pump water from a lower to a higher water reservoir, turning electrical energy into gravitational potential energy.
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