Barriers & Solutions to Scaling Long-Duration Energy Storage

Bryce Yonker (0:00)

Welcome to the next edition of GridPulse. I am Bryce Yonker with Grid Forward.

Today, we're going to have a little bit of a different podcast. We're going to weave together a few different conversations and try to get down to the bottom of what's going on in the long duration energy storage space. Initially, we've got our conversation with Allison Weis. Allison is at Wood Mack. Thanks for being on, Allison.

Allison Weis (0:23)

Very nice to join you today.

Bryce Yonker (0:25)

Can you give us a brief introduction of yourself?

Allison Weis (0:28)

Yes, I am the Global Head of Energy Storage at Wood Mackenzie. I work with our analysts around the world to forecast trends in storage buildout, technology, revenue, supply chain across the board.

Bryce Yonker (0:40)

You're the perfect person to have on. What does the landscape of longer duration energy storage look right now? If you need to define longer duration storage, feel welcome.

Allison Weis (0:52)

Yeah, so I think we generally think about it in two different buckets. We think about longer duration storage, it's still going to be operating on a daily cadence. It's in that 8- to 12-hour range, and there's some players working in that space, furthering a variety of technologies, really not honed in yet on one single type of technology being the winner, but we have things like Energy Dome.

Then there's compressed air storage, flow batteries, a lot of these are being built out very rapidly in China, but with slower introduction here in the United States. Then there's multi-day storage, like Forum Energy and others like Noon that are entering the space, where it's just a whole different kind of operation focused on longer wind droughts and reliability support in the system.

Bryce Yonker (1:42)

If you look back maybe two or three years, how has the space changed? Has it changed much?

I know this is a separate question, but where do you think things will be, say, in 2030, if we look a couple years ahead?

Allison Weis (1:55)

I think the main thing that has changed is the same as that we're seeing as a big impact across the market with the growth of data centers and other large loads. That need for bringing reliable and flexible capacity online to support that new load addition is affecting long-duration and making it more valuable as well.

We're seeing instances where there's going to be portfolios of assets added to grids to support new data centers coming online, and that will include long-duration combined with potentially shorter-duration storage and renewables to provide both the energy and the flexible capacity that is needed by systems.

Bryce Yonker (2:34)

You mentioned a fair amount of deployments in China and maybe somewhat of a limited amount elsewhere. Maybe you can just expand a little bit about what's happening there, why it's happening there, what's happening around the globe.

Allison Weis (2:47)

Yeah.

In China, they're funding a lot of projects that are still smaller in scale than some of the other projects that they're building on traditional renewables and lithium-ion assets. They've also massively expanded over the last several years in China. But given the scale of their market and their ambitions in renewable energy and energy integration, they're experimenting with a lot of different technologies and funding that build out. So we've seen a lot of flow batteries, compressed air and sodium ion go in in China compared to elsewhere in the world, still a very small percent of the total market.

Bryce Yonker (3:23)

So you mentioned that data center demand is surging, everybody knows that.

And so that's causing a little bit of an interest for forming up power supply. Who's looking to adopt longer duration storage solutions and why?

Allison Weis (3:39)

So this is really being considered where the utilities are bringing resources online, typically funded by the hyperscalers or data center developers, but where they can consider that portfolio view.

Long duration is not yet that common as a behind the meter resource. There we're seeing gas paired with more typical four-hour lithium ion solutions, but where they can consider placing resources in different locations in the system and just generally building across renewables, demand response, and other assets together to hit the required mix for new load.

Bryce Yonker (4:15)

One of the main things we wanted to ask about is, what's it going to take for commercial traction to continue to go forward? I know that might look different for some of the different technologies, so maybe you need to unpack it a few ways, but it's not just batteries as you were talking about. So what are some of the most important steps for further commercialization of these solutions?