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UNLOCKING RENEWABLES: Long-Duration Energy Storage Is Ready for Prime Time By Berit Anderson Why Read: Long-duration energy storage, long cited as a technical barrier to grid-level renewables, is finally ready for prime time. This week's Global Report takes you on a tour of some of the most promising entrants to the field and their novel approaches. ________ At last year's Future in Review conference, we recruited a cohort of some of the smartest minds in energy to develop a plan for transitioning global energy supply to 100% renewable energy in the next five years.
It was an impossible task. We knew that going in. The biggest challenge, after all, is not technological solutions for the transition - most of those already exist - but time. How do we maximize global renewable deployment - including resource and raw materials availability, global supply-chain issues, financing, manufacturing, and deployment - fast enough to limit global temperature variations within habitable bands? The solution that emerged from that challenge was largely communications-based: a global campaign to bring leaders along on the urgency of global renewable deployment. That being said, some key technical challenges do remain. One is long-duration energy storage, or the ability to store energy long enough to maintain a backup for times, day or night, when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. That variability in power supply has long been the primary reason given by utilities to explain why a fully maximized transition to renewables will never be possible. This is increasingly no longer the case. Last October, just before FiRe 2023, the US Department of Energy announced up to $325 million in funding for 15 long-duration energy storage (LDES) projects - part of its Long Duration Storage Shot moonshot program. Finally, we seemed to be seeing some cohesion in funding and focus on LDES as a core technical challenge. A year later, these and other projects are now moving from the test-site stage of development to the commercially viable stage. What had gotten us to that point?
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