Energy Frontiers

The Frontiers of Energy Storage

A recent article in Natures Energy compiled the views of ten leading experts in energy research. The overarching consensus shared by these experts was;

“changes to adapt and improve our energy system are greatly needed”

I urge you to take some time to read this article but I have highlighted some main points below in, hopefully, a digestible read.

Renewables are Essential

As policymakers grapple with developing global agreements to cut greenhouse gas emissions, science and technology must play a central role in lowering the costs of renewable and low-carbon energy solutions. A few technologies in particular will be vital to meeting the growth in energy demand and achieving the decarbonization transition.

• Solar Energy is the largest and homogenously distributed renewable resource;
• Scaling-up current photovoltaic technologies to meet global electricity needs over the longer term remains expensive;
• Advances in fundamental science, new materials and processes for photovoltaics and new system concepts for concentrated solar power, all have the potential to further enhance the relative competitiveness and rapid scale-up of solar power;
• The lowest cost, non-hydropower renewable energy resource at present is onshore wind;
• Offshore wind offers potential advantages but its progress will depend on providing low-cost transmission to shore;
• Ocean energy technologies — wave, tidal, ocean current and ocean thermal — are still relatively nascent, but symbiotic systems of floating offshore wind and/or wave turbines coupled with pumped hydropower energy storage could improve their economic viability;
• Geothermal energy can also play a much larger role. Particularly where the resource is relatively close to the surface, geothermal systems can provide heating and low-cost, dispatchable electricity;
• Modernizing the electricity grid will also be critical to our energy future new power systems, such as microgrids, offer opportunities for deploying renewable technologies in regions with growing demand but little existing infrastructure;

Adopting new policies and strengthening those that favour low-carbon and renewable energy technologies, increasing government financial support for basic energy research, and engaging with industry to help identify, scale up and commercialize the most promising technologies are all important for a successful global transition to a sustainable future.

Quantifying Change

In the next decades, policymakers will need to guide evolution in the energy sector to meet aggressive environmental goals, particularly those demanded by climate change mitigation, while still powering economic growth.

1. What technologies will we use to meet environmental goals?
2. What will be the primary business models in the sector?
3. Are different policies appropriate in the developing world?

At a high level, the energy sector can meet environmental goals either by supplying useful energy with less pollution, or by using less energy to produce the same services or some combination of both approaches.

Meanwhile, much of the electricity and natural gas in the world is supplied by vertically integrated state-owned firms or regulated natural monopolies. As technologies evolve, we will continue to benefit from economic analyses of the relative strengths and weaknesses of different market structures.

The most important task for economic researchers is to better understand the energy sectors in the developing world. The developing world may offer important opportunities to deploy new technologies given the current lack of infrastructure.

Catalysing Transport

World transportation fuel consumption currently amounts to 50 million barrels per day (Mbd; 1 barrel = 159 litres), 95% of that being produced from crude oil. The current vehicle fleet is 1.2 billion cars, with a staggering growth to 2.4 billion cars expected by 2035.

In this sector two developments are required: the increased use of alternative fuels (biofuels, liquid petroleum gas, natural gas, electricity) and the production and usage of conventional fuels in a more energy-efficient way.

It is clear that liquid transportation fuels will be needed for a long time, but through developments in catalysis it should be possible to broaden the resource base, increase process efficiency and reduce the impact on our environment.

Looking Beyond the Short Term

Large-scale changes to our energy systems are needed: we must decarbonize power generation; energy efficiency must be improved; we will need a new energy vector for vehicles (probably electricity, possibly hydrogen); and there is a need to decarbonize heating and cooling (which often looks difficult).

These changes require that a new energy infrastructure emerges over decades.

Investor confidence is of profound importance to decarbonization, because the total capital investment required is huge. There is unprecedented interest from international and institutional investors (such as pension funds) in renewable energy.

The Lightest of Fuels

Hydrogen is extremely versatile. It can be used to produce energy-rich upgraded biofuels or can be reacted with concentrated CO sources, such as flue gas, to produce methanol or synfuel. Furthermore, hydrogen can be used directly for combustion in a turbine or used in a fuel cell for transportation or grid-scale energy storage.

Low-cost hydrogen is currently produced mainly by steam reforming of natural gas. However, this process also releases CO and CO. Two alternative low-carbon approaches are the electrolytic production of hydrogen using sustainable sources of electricity, and direct hydrogen production from water splitting under sunlight by artificial photosynthesis.

Access to Efficiency

Consumers buy energy and use it to achieve a service — transportation, lighting, cooling food and keeping warm. The cost of the service depends on the efficiency of the equipment used by the consumer: energy-inefficient products result in an expensive service.

The debate about whether capital should be spent on providing additional supply or on reducing the demand for energy rarely occurs. Yet, capital spent on improved energy efficiency means reductions in fuel bills for the consumer and in carbon emissions, in new sources of energy supply. A greater focus on energy efficiency in buildings and equipment will mean people are warmer and the planet is cooler.

Deconstructing Biomass

The environmentally sustainable biofuels industry has matured to a critical point where commercial manufacturing facilities have been launched. Advances in elucidating the fundamental genetic factors controlling the resistance of biomass to structural change have grown exponentially over the past decade.

The development of tailored energy crops requires advances in agronomic science, including enhancing plant productivity, minimizing water demand, increasing resilience to pests and disease and abiotic stresses, and efficient nutrient utilization, while providing favourable life-cycle benefits. In all likelihood, biological biomass deconstruction and conversion platforms will become integrated with specific crops.

Progress will also be required in chemical engineering to design lower-cost catalysts for the upgrading of bio-oils by deoxygenation and hydro-treatment along with the ability to generate and use renewable sources of hydrogen. These advances in biofuels generation will be accompanied by a host of process engineering challenges requiring advances in separation technologies, reactor design, sensors, process control and waste minimization and treatment.

The biological generation of biofuels will move from a single-product production facility to the petroleum production model, in which starting resources are fractionated and all molecular components are used to maximize value generation.

To successfully accomplish this vision, advances in several fronts of plant science, biological conversion, bioinformatics, catalysis, analytical chemistry, and biochemical and chemical engineering are needed.

The Power of People

New technologies and systems will make the electricity grid increasingly decentralized, integrated and automated, while a new mind-set and enhanced level of engagement will enable households and businesses to play a more active role as both producers and consumers. This shift from centralized to distributed, from single-source to multi-source, from unidirectional to multidirectional, highlights the growing network of actors that will be involved in guaranteeing the grid's reliability. Such changes emphasize the need to better understand the human dimensions of energy systems, both social and behavioural.

Although researchers still have many questions to address, policymakers, utilities and businesses are beginning to recognize the importance of more people-centric approaches. Understanding the human dimensions of energy offers the promise of generating valuable insights about our energy culture, historical and future shifts in our everyday energy practices, sources of variation in our energy-use patterns, and effective mechanisms for transforming how people, organizations and societies use energy. These insights can empower people and organizations to become the source of innovative, broad-based energy and climate solutions that could dramatically amplify and catalyse our ability to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions and transform our energy culture.

Storage at the Threshold

The next storage frontiers are transportation and the electricity grid, requiring storage of much greater power and energy at a lower cost.

Next-generation electric vehicles must be safe, long-range and fast-charging while using less energy, emitting less carbon, and costing less to buy and operate than the incumbent gasoline-powered cars.

Storage for the grid, in contrast, promises an entirely new horizon of electricity services well beyond those provided by existing technologies. For grid operators, these include smoothing the seconds-to-minutes fluctuations of renewable wind and solar generation; time-shifting by several hours the excess night-time wind or daytime solar electricity to meet early evening demand; replacing expensive and inefficient peak-load power plants with cheaper, cleaner and more efficient stored baseload electricity; and regulating frequency and voltage to produce ultra-steady, digital-quality power.

The batteries required for these new services are as diverse as the services themselves, incorporating specific combinations of high or low power, high or low energy, and frequent or infrequent cycling. Distributed storage and generation configured to match local customer needs adds a new dimension of grid architectures that can provide tailored electricity services that are more effective and efficient than those of the traditional centralized grid.

Transformative change in transportation and the grid requires next-generation storage with significantly higher performance and lower cost.

A Gradual Decline

Difficult economic realities explain why nuclear power is in decline in the countries that historically had the most reactors. Although many of these countries continue to promote nuclear power as a low-carbon technology that can mitigate climate change, the argument has weakened significantly as costs of wind and solar energy have declined sharply.

The picture is different in emerging economies: energy demand is growing rapidly, leading to construction of just about every form of electricity generation known. The two most populous of these economies — China and India — have great ambitions for nuclear power, and everything else.

In short, China, India and other developing countries are following an all-of-the-above strategy. As a result, although the overall capacity of nuclear energy might grow, globally the share of nuclear power in electricity generation will continue to drop.

What could change this picture? The nuclear industry and its promoters hope that radically new reactor designs could be developed, commercialized and adopted widely.

In summary there is a lot to be done on multiple fronts including human and technology. The will is evident and the technology is becoming efficient, effective and economic. Investors are making funds available and taking a long term approach.

The coming decades may just realise this energy transformation.

Read the full article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy201520