Correction: Professor Ray Wills has brought to my attention, that this graph above has the wrong attribution. Below you can find the correct information and you are welcome to visit his website at raywills.net and follow him on Twitter @ProfRayWills
We have been talking here a lot about the coming tide of electric cars, now it is time to look out for the tsunami of lithium storage applications following the earthquake with an eruption of Solar Power Generation Capacity which is shattering the $8 Trillion dollars Energy Industry. Today is Earth Day and what is the better way to celebrate it than to ditch fossils and their dirty "clean coal" at least for a day? The UK was generating all its power yesterday without a single coal plant being online. It can be done, the future is already here, it is just not everybody knows about it.
Lithium is the magic metal at the very heart of this Energy rEVolution and International Lithium is Lithium Strategic Investments and Royalty Company which is plugged-in the most dynamic EV and Energy Storage markets in China with partners like a giant from China Ganfeng Lithium.
Energy rEVolution: Who Will Be Left Holding The Bag? Oil And Gas Companies Are Facing Major Technological Disruption.
You can spin a lot of things around in this day and age, you can even try to "Make Coal Clean Again". But once a technology is developed to address the particular problem, the magic of mass production is taking place and costs are going down fast in accordance with Moore's law for chips and "The Learning Curve" laws for the other industries.
We are at the major bifurcation point for our civilization, Energy rEVolution is unstoppable now. We can produce Renewable Energy cheaper than any other fossil alternatives. And now we can store it and use when we want it with Lithium Energy Storage Technology. You can build some walls to protect some fossils in business, but when Reds are going Green this process is making a truly tectonic geopolitical shift.
When China is going full ahead building the new Manufacturing Base of the 4th Industrial rEVolution with its New Energy Plan, the West is better to take notice.We are not just talking here about the largest in the world Solar and Wind generation capacity in China or its largest market for Electric Cars in the world.
We are talking about Oil becoming less and less important in terms of being like Blood for The Economy when everything just stops without it being pumped through The Economic and Financial System every single day. Suddenly, one society can live without burning it every day just to get around the block. It will have its place in the military, air transportation and chemical industries, but it is not as precious as Blood anymore.
Now, let's think about the most important subject here. What will happen to all other societies? To those ones which are built all around Oil? When their military power suddenly becomes irrelevant. When they are left with Trillions of dollars in stranded assets glued to Oil. This is the real disruption and asymmetric warfare. Who needs war when you are building Steam Engines just to "Make America Great Again"?
The last insult will come when the best brilliant scientific minds will start following the best technology in the Transfer of The History to China as well. We still have some time to make The Switch, but this time is running out very fast. Who will be left holding the bag with Trillions of dollars worthless stranded assets after this energy rEVolution will claim its victims?
Back Into The Future: Lithium Will Power Us For The Next 50 Years And Then Robots.
Lithium Race And The New Energy Plan: China Will Plow $361 Billion Into Renewable Power Generation By 2020.
"We have very serious money coming very fast into renewable energy space all over the world now. Bill Gates is making a Billion dollar fund to invest in the clean energy and China cannot really hide anymore its very ambitious quest for the world domination ... in all things Green first. And Green is the color of money this time. And I actually think that these are very positive developments: hopefully, President Trump will not help just China to become Great again and America will get its fair share of common sense.
Let's all better compete in the Clean Energy Race than Arms Race. Asymmetric Warfare will be the name of the game now. Solar and Electric Cars mean business these days. Whoever will succeed to bring them all up to the state level scale will enjoy the benefits of virtually free energy after the CAPEX is invested, while the other side will be sitting on Trillions of dollars in stranded assets.
Trade War - anybody? It has never stopped really and is taking its way now with the tide of disrupting technologies from the labs with literally millions of the best-trained engineering minds and into the markets taking them by storm. FED central planners can never really even imagine what the real central planning can do: China's New Energy Plan is in action now. So one would think: who should call whom now first: Elon Musk or Donal Trump? Read more."
Energy Storage Report:
Webinar’s solar-plus-battery secrets
By Jason Deign
Combining battery storage with solar generation is already cheaper than using diesel in most microgrids, said experts at an Energy Storage Report webinar last week.
“As the key applications, we see islanded grids or microgrids, [where] PV and batteries are becoming cost-competitive with diesel,” confirmed Valts Grintals from Delta Energy & Environment in the event organised alongside Ata Insights.
A case in point is France, where interest in solar plus storage is highest in islands and “non-interconnected zones,” where around 60% of PV projects so far have been installed with batteries, Grintals said.
This interest is set to grow following the launch of a tender last year for almost 52MW more of island-based solar capacity, spread across 33 projects. “We expect to see more storage coming into these projects,” said Grintals.
“In France, PV and storage is a great solution to stabilise the grid [and] help enable microgrid use, and it is already cost competitive.”
Important applications for storage
Other important applications for storage with solar include grids where renewable energy integration is an issue, or places where a grid connection cannot handle new PV capacity, he said.
As well as France, Delta predicts solar plus storage is due to take off in Australia, Canada, South Africa, US and the UK. Australia is perhaps one of the biggest markets so far for large-scale PV with storage.
Grintals said 50% of PV projects were now being developed with storage, again with microgrids representing a significant portion.
Major microgrid developments to date include the 800kW, 2MWh Daly River Solar Projectand the 2MW, 500kWh Garden Island Project.
Another speaker in the webinar, Burak Türker of Younicos, said microgrid designers were using batteries as a way of reducing the need for curtailment of both solar and wind energy.
Increasing self-consumption
At the same time, battery storage could help increase self-consumption, achieve higher renewable energy shares, improve ramp rates, comply with system operator requirements, and carry out demand shifting and arbitrage.
Younicos has put the microgrid solar-plus-storage theory into practice on Graciosa in the Azores.
There the company installed a 4MW, 3.2MWh lithium-ion battery system alongside solar and wind to cut down on diesel consumption.
Younicos has calculated the microgrid will have an 11% internal rate of return and a full system payback period of less than 15 years, saving almost 2.4m litres of diesel and cutting carbon emissions by 6,305 tons of CO2 a year.
While microgrids offer one of the best business cases for solar plus storage, the webinar speakers also noted growth in several other applications.
“We’ve noticed a huge interest”
For example, said Oscar Pereles, chief operating officer of Ata Renewables: “We’ve noticed a huge interest in our customers, in the last year or year and a half, in what could be potential solutions of utility-scale PV and batteries.”
Markets are moving from centralised to distributed generation, he said, but according to Navigant Research most energy storage will continue to be deployed on utility networks for the foreseeable future.
“The projects are in exponential growth,” he said. “We think storage will be a tsunami in the next five to 10 years.”
Technology-wise, all speakers agreed that lithium-ion was by far the market leader, although flow batteries were also mentioned as being of interest.
In terms of cost, flow and lithium-ion batteries are due to converge on pumped hydro by 2024, Navigant Research predicts.
Containerised lithium-ion storage
Pereles noted that Ata Renewables had been working on the potential for installing containerised lithium-ion storage in Puerto Rico since 2010, and had originally seen prices of around USD$1m for a 1MW, 420kWh system.
“That price has come down, as of today, to a half,” he said. “We’re talking prices for power batteries of around $1 a watt power and around half a dollar a watt-hour for energy applications.”
This fall in costs is driving solar-plus-storage take-up among utilities, for energy shifting, he said.
One example is Tesla’s Powerpack installation on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where Tesla is providing the local utility with solar power at less than $0.14 per kilowatt-hour. That’s around 10% cheaper than what was available before.
Increasingly, adding batteries is to solar is no longer a prohibitively costly exercise, as Ata Renewables showed with an analysis of the impact of batteries on the cost of an 800MW PV plant in the United Arab Emirates.
A modest effect on the price of energy
It found the addition of current-market lithium-ion power batteries only had a modest effect on the price of energy, increasing it from $0.029 to $0.035 per kWh.
Moving to energy applications, the price rose to $0.0526 with one hour of storage, $0.0726 with two hours, $0.0889 with three hours and $0.0997 with four.
“With today’s technology, we can make an 800MW facility with a four-hour storage system, with shifting capabilities, below 10 cents,” Pereles said. “We might be able to compete with many other dispatchable energies today.”
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