Last week, the city of Los Angeles inked a deal for a solar-plus-storage system at a record-low price. The 400-MW Eland solar power project will be capable of storing 1,200 megawatt-hours of energy in lithium-ion batteries to meet demand at night. The project is a part of the city’s climate commitment to reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2045.
Electricity and heat production are the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Carbon-free electricity will be critical for keeping the average global temperature rise to within the United Nations’ target of 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst effects of climate change. As world leaders meet at the United Nations Climate Action Summit next week, boosting renewable energy and energy storage will be major priorities.
Wind and solar skeptics are quick to point out that such systems are expensive and can’t keep the lights on 24/7. The first argument is wilting as renewables become cost-competitive with fossil fuels. The second one also boils down to cost: that of energy storage, which will be essential for sending large amounts of renewable energy to the grid when needed.
“Low-cost storage is the key to enabling renewable electricity to compete with fossil fuel generated electricity on a cost basis,” says Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials science and engineering professor at MIT.
But exactly how low? Chiang, professor of energy studies Jessika Trancik, and others have determined that energy storage would have to cost roughly US $20 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the grid to be 100 percent powered by a wind-solar mix. Their analysis is published in Joule.
That’s an intimidating stretch for lithium-ion batteries, which dipped to $175/kWh in 2018. But things look up if you loosen the constraints on renewable energy, the researchers say. Then, storage technologies that meet the cost target are within reach.
The team picked four locations—Arizona, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Texas—and gathered 20 years of data on those solar and wind resources there. Such resources can change considerably with the seasons and over the years, and their longer-term analysis—while previous studies had used data from just a year or two—captures the variations that may occur over the lifetime of a power plant, the researchers say. They modeled the costs of wind-solar-plus-storage systems that would reliably meet various grid demands, such as providing baseload energy 24/7 and meeting peak-hour spikes in demand for a few hours.
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