Batteries have been beating expectations in recent years as costs continue to fall. That’s good news for the storage industry, but reveals a shortcoming in the scientific understanding of the trend.
That discrepancy prompted UC Berkeley professor Daniel Kammen to devise a new model, recently published in Nature Energy — and it ended up predicting that future cost declines will occur at a pace faster than identified in previous analyses.
Scholars have modeled clean-energy cost declines based on single factors, like annual production or cumulative production. These one-factor models approximate reductions from learning by doing: The more an industry deploys its product, the better it gets at it.
These models have a high explanatory value, but they didn’t see the recent battery-cost drops coming. They overestimate lithium-ion costs in the 2010-2015 period, the most recent years in the data set Kammen and his colleagues examined.
Their new model explains cost as the function of two variables: production volume and cumulative patents issued under the international Patent Cooperation Treaty.
When the researchers plugged in the latest battery production forecasts, with the assumption that patent activity continues at the average rate from the last five years in the dataset, they found a striking prediction.
“We find lower cost reductions than existing forecasts in the literature, which in the past has found a systematic underestimation of falling electric-vehicle battery costs,” the study says.
At the battery pack level, lithium-ion needs to hit the $125 to $165 per kilowatt-hour range to compete with internal combustion engines (based on 2015 gas prices). The two-factor model predicts EV cost-competitiveness will arrive between 2017 and 2020. This is earlier than the previous literature predicts.
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ALISO VIEJO, CA–(Marketwired – Aug 15, 2017) – 
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UltraCharge Limited (ASX: UTR) continues its push to establish itself as a major player in the global battery technology market.
The Renewables Infrastructure Group (TRIG) has become the latest investor to enter the large scale storage market after buying a 20MW project from RES for £20 million.
The prospect of paying for using charging stations isn’t as unpleasant as the anxiety of finding a station in the first place for some electric car owners. But as EVs and charging stations propagate, the opposite situation may emerge as charging stations will pay EV owners for selling juice back to the power grid.
The latest phase of a AUS$55 million (US$43.8 million) programme giving remote communities in Australia’s Northern Territory reliable and clean power will see a 2MWh battery installed and paired with more than 3,000 solar PV panels.
The outlook for the utility-side-of-the-meter energy storage industry is bright. IHS Markit reports that the global pipeline for utility-side energy storage has doubled in the past years to 3.4 gigawatts. It also predicts strong growth for this market in the coming years. In addition, the Bloomberg New Energy Finances Outlook 2016 report indicates that the global energy storage market will be valued at $250 billion by 2040, with some 25 gigawatts in capacity installed by 2028. Clearly, there’s a strong upside for utilities interested in investing in the growing energy storage market.
The rise of electric vehicles and the quest to find solutions to energy storage for the renewables industry have created a breeding ground for tech experts to develop battery technologies.
