Video: Emerging applications for long duration energy storage

The energy storage market continues to evolve, but long duration energy storage (LDES) holds the potential to support a variety of applications that challenge the electrical grid. The most recent episode of “Dispatches from the Energy Transition,” a webinar series hosted by Mayfield Renewables and Outfit, titled “The Promise of Long Duration Energy Storage,” explored LDES and its impact on the energy transition, from utility-scale use cases to C&I applications such as data centers and industrial microgrids.

“Dispatches from the Energy Transition” is hosted by Robert Cross, principal at Outfit, a clean tech marketing agency, and Lucas Miller, senior engineering consultant at Mayfield Renewables, which provides third-party engineering services for C&I, small utility-scale and microgrid projects, as well as some education services for the solar + storage industry.

The guest speakers for Episode 7 of the webinar series were:

Brad Dore, VP of global marketing at EnerVenue. EnerVenue is a differentiated battery technology provider, specializing in Energy Storage Vessels (ESVs), which features industry-leading safety behavior that enables installations in areas never considered before for C&I energy storage projects — including building-integrated storage. EnerVenue’s ESV technology uses metal-hydrogen technology adapted from innovations developed by NASA that is stable, resilient and offers a reduced risk of thermal runaway for a battery designed with a 30,000-cycle life.

Jakir Hossain, Ph.D., CTO and cofounder of Storlytics Energy Storage. Storlytics is a software and consulting firm that performs energy storage modeling for utilities, national labs, developers, and integrators.

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Long Duration Energy Storage Modeling

To properly model the performance of an LDES system, Hossain explains that companies must look more broadly at use cases to determine the operating expenses.  

“It really depends on how you are using the battery and to be able to do modeling that can capture all these physical characteristics like self-discharge, losses, degradation, and then you can accurately project what your project OPEX are going to be over its lifetime. Instead of making the call based on something [that] might look more expensive just based on dollar per kW today. It doesn’t necessarily mean over the 20-year project life that’s going to be the most expensive solution. You really need to look at the overall project life cost than just the cost of the technology today.”

Dore explains that LDES is defined in the UK as 6 hours or more of discharge, while the U.S. defines it as 10 hours or more — and “more” could mean tens or even hundreds of hours discharge — with a so-called “sweet spot” of 8-10 hours.

“There’s really quite a quite a large breadth of potential possibilities out there with long duration energy storage,” Dore says. “What excites us is there’s a number of applications that fit within those various kinds of segments. As we see the storage market evolving, we’re going to see different applications that can really utilize that 10-hour discharge, that can really utilize a 12-hour discharge, or the flexibility to charge at two and discharge at 10, and it really opens up some possibilities in terms of what we’re doing on the grid.”

LDES for utility-scale or C&I

The webinar explored several specific applications that would benefit from LDES systems. (Skip to that section in the video above)

Hossain explained how this technology could be used for utility-scale operations to help address load growth. Utilities developing an integrated resource plan for five, 10 or 15 years into the future, could harness LDES to solve challenges. Hossain says 4-hour lithium solutions are the “default” in terms of what is economically viable for utility-scale.  

On the other hand, Dore explained potential C&I applications of LDES, including to power next-generation data centers, where energy demand growth is expected to reach 530 TWh by 2028.  

“We’ve been hearing about data centers so frequently in the media,” Dore says. “I mean raise your hand if you haven’t read an article about the energy demands of data centers in the last two or three days. We know that between the data center boom and the energy demand that’s being driven by AI technologies that this is the spot that’s ripe for energy storage.”

Data centers represent a rapidly growing market segment for energy storage and renewable energy.

“There’s 11,000 data centers worldwide, and data centers account today for about 4% of global energy consumption,” Dore says. “That consumption increased by 55% in 2023 over 2022, so this is an accelerating and increasing market. It’s expected to double to almost $2.24 billion by 2030.”

Another application suitable for LDES is industrial microgrids, larger commercial facilities that may or may not be connected to the grid.

“One of one of the things that we’re seeing is a large uptick in interest from traditional oil and gas players that are looking to decarbonize their operations,” Dore says. “If you look at just the oil and gas market accounts for 9% of all global CO2 emissions on its own. Mining is responsible for a huge percentage of the world’s annual electrical consumption. When you’re just talking about the mining and the industrial sector, they’ve got strong carbon reduction goals and requirements to install renewable energy, and certainly storage is a way that that can be done.”

Timestamps

Be sure to watch the full presentation at the top of this post, or skip to a specific section below…

  • 00:00 – Introduction
  • 01:54 – Guest Introductions
  • 04:12 – Storlytics Overview
  • 13:00 – EnerVenue Overview
  • 16:20 – About LDES
  • 19:50 – Metal-Hydrogen Overview
  • 22:22 – Project Development
  • 25:12 – Vessel Characteristics and Modeling
  • 28:25 – EnerVenue Markets
  • 30:09 – Battery Fire Safety for Hydrogen Batteries
  • 40:00 – Applications
  • 46:30 – Data Centers / C&I scale applications
  • 53:40 – Flexible / LDES Application – Industrial Microgrids
  • 57:06 – Key Takeaways
  • 59:25 – Guest Information
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