Energy Storage Moonshot

Six national energy labs and a cohort of 200 partners across the energy industry have joined together in a moonshot effort to vastly expand energy storage in America.

It is all being coordinated through the National Consortium for the Advancement of Long Duration Energy Storage technologies.

Will McNamara Grid Energy Policy Storage Analyst with Sandia National Laboratories, heads up the LDES Constorium. McNamara described the LDES project as a guest on the U.S. Department of Energy Grid Talk podcast, energy.gov/gridtalk.

Grid Talk is now completing its fourth year of podcast conversations with the technology, policy and corporate leaders of the electric sector and energy. downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Energy storage is considered the holy grail that would unlock a vast increase in solar and wind renewable electricity generation. The goal is to boost storage technology on a large scale from about four hours duration to 10 hours, McNamara said.

By mid-century, by 2050, we’re going to need 450 gigawatts of long-duration energy storage to achieve our carbon reductiongoals. That’s more than 4? times the total output of our nuclear power plants now in operation.

“There was a proposal call issued by the Department of Energy offering funds to the national labs to create an industry forum focused on the many challenges that are facing long-duration energy storage technologies and create this forum so that the industry can come together and address these challenges,” McNamara told Grid Talk.

“The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow so we need to find a way to store the energy to make it dispatchable, hence the need for energy storage, so we are absolutely in this evolutionary period. We are building the constructs for the future,” McNamara said.