Grid storage is universally thought of as a good idea. But utilities don’t yet have a clue which technologies to choose and where to deploy them.
"We all agree it's a good idea," says Paul De Martini of Southern California Edison. But "we're at 50,000 feet."
The uncertainty could delay the spread of renewable energy, particular solar and wind energy, as executives evaluate options and wait for clear winners in the market. Both solar and wind create intermittent power streams making the ability to store energy for when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing critical.
This dilemma is apparent to Paul De Martini, vice president of advanced technology at Southern California Edison, who spoke Wednesday afternoon at Stanford University.
“We’re at 50,000 feet” in terms of understanding the market, says De Martini. “We all agree it’s a good idea.” But the utility doesn’t know how much storage it needs and whether it should deploy it near homes, near transmission facilities or somewhere between.
De Martini says he has identified 40 different storage technologies that are under development. They range from lithium ion batteries, to uphill water pumps, flywheels and ice storage.
In discussions with the companies, it is difficult for Southern California Edison to describe exactly what its needs are, he said. And “there’s not a really good set of requirements out in the industry.”
Some say the short-term answer is all of the above. “We need to be thinking about storage in every form,” says Jim Detmers, vice president of operations, at California ISO, which runs the state’s electric transmission gird. “We don’t want to limit ourselves to just one type.”
And yet that will likely delay implementation and cost more, since more development money will need to be spent. In an address last week, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said his favorite is a technology that pumps water uphill, only to let it flow down again and spin turbines when the sun stops shining. Perhaps a high profile test project is in order.
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Edison will likely work with a number of storage technologies in a number of applications. There is no one-size-fits-all. Thermal storage works for summer peak. Battery electric storage does nearly everything else. Some electric storage techs are better at one thing than another. The best for large bulk grid storage is the vanadium redox flow battery (VRB-ESS)by Prudent Energy. It requires more room than some systems, like lithium, but it handles multi-cycling for intermittent renewables, hours of storage for peak shifting, and has a 20 year life cycle. http://www.utility-savings.com for more detail.