By Mark Anderson
As the electric grid is increasingly powered by renewables, it will need energy storage for when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. But the three top grid-scale energy storage technologies today—pumped hydropower, lithium-ion batteries and “flow” batteries—arguably, aren’t up to the challenge.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s technology incubator ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) wants to change that. It’s going long on a number of high-risk, high-reward R&D projects that might change the entire grid storage equation. U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has said he thinks grid-scale battery storage will be the key innovation that enables the grid to completely decarbonize by midcentury.
“There’s a lot of discussion about what the grid of the future will look like,” says Eric Rohlfing, ARPA-E Deputy Director for Technology. “Of course what we want to do is enable much higher penetration of renewables. So storage is an obvious way to do that… The two key points of grid storage are: it has to be cheap, and it has to be durable—to go through a lot of cycles.”
Full article is at: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/green-tech/fuel-cells/arpaes-85million-plan-to-build-a-battery-the-size-of-the-grid