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At the Republican National Convention Committee's annual dinner in Washington this month, President Donald Trump announced the news with some curious remarks about wind energy. What has become viral is his false suggestion that the noise of wind turbines is causing cancer, but he also warned that local values drop by 75% when a windmill is built at proximity. He also claimed that wind power is excessively expensive when in fact, in much of America, it is now the cheapest source of electricity. The president then played the role of a woman who complained about the supposed unreliability of wind energy to her husband: "I can not watch television, darling. Honey, please, tell the wind to blow!
That too was unfounded, but at the same time, it was actually a daunting challenge for the clean energy revolution: "intermittence" of the "clean energy". wind and solar electricity. While more renewable energy is replacing Trump's preferred coal plants and as more states seek to eliminate fossil fuels from their electrical grids, utilities are wondering how to ensure uninterrupted service when the wind does not do not breathe and the sun does not shine. . Some states are already starting to draw much of their electricity from renewables. While the president's exaggerated scenario, based on a weather-dependent television, reflects his general disdain for climate-friendly technologies, reliability could become a more and more daunting problem as the network goes green.
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But another technological revolution is underway, which could help solve this problem: a boom in electricity storage. The cost of lithium-ion batteries has dropped by 85% in a decade and by 30% in just one year. US utilities have begun to connect containers to the network – and plan to install more of them in the coming years. Electricity has always been the most difficult product to manage because unlike water, grain, fuel or steel, it was largely impossible to store for later use. . But this is changing rapidly, and even though the dramatic growth of batteries on the grid will be invisible to most Americans, it could transform the way we produce and consume energy, creating more flexible and resilient electrical systems. with less waste and lower costs. and less emissions.
"It will be like switching from analogue to digital or from landline phones to cell phones," said Susan Kennedy, CEO of Advanced Microgrid Systems, whose software helps utilities optimize their energy choices every day. every moment. "The energy sector will never be the same again."
Electricity storage will change the network in many ways, but the most important is its potential to accelerate the already explosive growth of renewable energy, which will have political implications. Trump won 20 of the 21 states with the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions. The only exception, New Mexico, has just passed a law to ensure that 100% of electricity is clean by 2045. By contrast, Hillary Clinton has won the eight-state broadcasts the lowest per capita. But this division of carbon is not necessarily permanent. Eighty percent of the wind energy installed during Trump's presidency was built in states he won, and the five most wind-dependent states were all Trump states. And if the storage boom began in blue states, like California and Hawaii, it also takes off in Texas, Florida and the rest of Red America. Polls suggest that "clean energy" is now popular across the country, even though "climate action" is not, and there are now more than 3 million clean energy jobs in America, against only 50,000 jobs in the coal industry. The president's rhetoric on fossil fuels no longer reflects the reality on the ground. And energy policy could become less partisan in a world where renewable energies become much more commonplace.
The world of energy is really changing at the speed of light. Wind and solar power has almost quintupled over the past decade, providing 9% of US electricity last year without emitting greenhouse gases. This has further complicated the already arduous task of balancing supply and demand on the grid at every moment, forcing utilities to react to all the clouds and all the winds that pass. The rise of Big Data has made it possible to identify the places where more electrons were needed in real time, while the new transmission lines have made it possible to move the electrons over longer distances to meet the needs. these needs. But lithium-ion batteries were too expensive to use to capture electricity on the grid before another technological transformation – the growth of electric vehicles, went from scratch ten years ago to over 40 years ago. a million on American roads today – reduce their costs through mass production.
Now, storage on the network is about to grow at a faster rate than electric cars, which makes it cost effective and even faster than the renewable energy that it will help to integrate on the network. Last year, Florida Power & Light built a 10 megawatt network battery, considered the largest of its kind in the world. Last month, FPL announced a battery project more than 40 times larger. Republican regulators in Arizona have recently approved more than twice as much energy storage in their state as the country as a whole installed last year; Hawaii builds more than three times and California nearly five times more. Tom Buttgenbach, CEO of 8minutenergy Renewables, says his company has signed contracts for the construction of nearly one gigawatt of networked storage in the United States, more than two-thirds of the national total in the last four months.
Overall, consulting firm Wood MacKenzie expects US storage capacity additions to double in 2019, triple in 2020 and multiply by 13 over the next five years. would provide enough electricity to power more than 5 million homes. Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasters are banking on a global investment of more than $ 600 billion in battery storage by 2040. The storage boom, like so many other green trends in America, has hit the ground. first appeared in California, but Ravi Manghani, head of Wood MacKenzie's energy storage research, he says, is spreading much faster than expected, thus ending the era when the power should be distributed and used from the moment it was generated.
"Whenever we make a new forecast, we need to revise it to deploy it and reduce costs," says Ravi Manghani, Wood MacKenzie's Energy Storage Research Manager. "We have been proven that we were wrong again and again."
Due to the steep drop in costs, utilities are now building new wind and solar farms accompanied by new battery storage, for a lower price than they would have paid for the construction of new power plants. fossil fuels – and in some cases lower than they would have paid to manage existing fossil fuels. plants. The coupling of renewable energies with storage allows grid operators to fill gaps when time is not available and to route energy more predictably when they need it most. Batteries may contain excess solar energy early in the day, for example, to be used during peak rush hours in the late afternoon, reducing the need for costly "advanced" natural gas facilities that must be fed whenever the demand increases. According to Wood MacKenzie's Manghani, utilities could replace batteries with 80 percent of the gas generators they planned to build by 2026. Jigar Shah, founder of solar company Sun Edison and now president of the finance company Generate Capital believes that hundreds of billions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art fossil-fueled plants, which often only run a few hundred hours a year, could soon be permanently destroyed.
Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of the Energy Storage Association, who represents the industry, worked for Sun Edison at the dawn of the solar boom, and she has a sense of déjà vu. She remembers that one week she would hear about the country's biggest solar project, only to hear about a new, bigger project next week. The idea of converting the sun into energy was beginning to capture the imagination. now, the idea of retaining this power to be able to distribute it where it is needed generates the same type of excitement among mobsters.
"It's funny, people have always said it would be great if storage ever happened," says Speakes-Backman. "It's happening now."
Shah says that the spectacular growth of utility-built storage alongside solar power plants could eventually be undermined by homes and businesses installing battery units "behind the counter" to store solar energy from their roofs; Last year, 15,000 individual battery storage units, such as the Tesla PowerWall, were installed in the United States. It's still a tiny part of the market, but five times higher than the year before. Utilities also build batteries next to wind farms, storing excess night generation for use during morning rush hours, as families prepare to work and go to school. The Southwest Power Pool, which operates the network serving 14 central, windy and republican states, now has 5 gigawatts of standby storage projects, nearly four times the current total in the United States.
"It gives you an idea of the magnitude of the interest," says Bruce Rew, vice president of operations. "We have a lot of wind and storage will help us manage it."
According to Rew, grid operators once feared that they could not guarantee their reliability once renewable energies accounted for 25% of their costs, but the Southwest Power Pool now systematically manages 50% and even 60% of wind generation while maintaining lighting lit continuously. . There was an afternoon last month when the Californian network was receiving more than two-thirds of its solar energy, with no reliability issues.
Until now, lithium-ion battery projects put online only provide a few hours of short-term storage, capable of transferring energy in times of high demand or filling short gaps due to cloud cover, calm winds or other generation problems. Advanced battery technologies using vanadium and other chemicals could someday store energy for days or even months, but are not yet profitable. For the moment, wind farms and solar farms with batteries do not yet represent the equivalent of coal, gas or nuclear "minimal charge" power stations that can generate electricity 24 hours a day.
The Trump administration used this theoretical reliability gap to argue that the removal of dirty and inefficient coal-fired power plants (as well as zero-emission but unprofitable nuclear power plants) could threaten the stability of the grid and push up present without success, to a rescue plan to keep them online. At a recent Senate hearing, Energy Secretary Rick Perry spoke of the specter of blackouts caused by excessive reliance on renewables: "Maybe it's time for us to have a conversation in this country: do we need a stable basic energy load?
But utilities continue to replace coal-fired power plants relentlessly with cleaner, less expensive options. Meanwhile, more than 20 states have changed their laws or regulations to make storage more feasible in the last two years. Even very red states like Texas, Indiana and Arkansas have started adding batteries to their network. A recent order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission also helps clarify market rules and encourages grid operators to incorporate storage into their long-term planning. And Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) Introduced this month a bill that would extend a 30% tax credit to battery projects, with the support of the entire renewable energy sector.
Political debates on energy tend to be extremely partisan, with Democrats attacking Republicans as climate deniers, addicted to fossil fuel money, and Republicans attacking Democrats as socialist tree traffickers. want to ban air travel. Deal. But battery storage has not yet escalated into a shirt problem, even though it's clearly a green technology adopted by representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN. Y.) and other fans of the Green New Deal. This is partly because influential public services in all political sectors have adopted storage as a tool to save money and improve their reliability, and partly because even the most red-lighted states are trying to integrate low-cost renewable energy into their networks. Even Trump's latest budget, which proposed strong reductions in renewable energy, included a new "Launchpad" initiative to promote long-term energy storage research, which Perry called "holy grail" for the network. And while the White House has proposed the elimination of ARPA-E, a 10-year-old federal agency for advanced energy research, Congress has kept it alive and its leaders have created a new funding competition for advanced storage projects.
"A lot of Republicans who do not want a Green New Deal want to see this kind of investment in innovation," says Rich Powell, executive director of ClearPath, a group that supports conservative anti-change policies. climate.
Innovation could produce breakthroughs that would make intermittent wind and solar power plants more efficient as environmentally friendly versions of 24-hour fossil fuel power plants. The Holy Grail of long-term storage is currently only available. with older niche technologies, such as "pumped hydraulics", which only operates around hydroelectric dams with upper and lower reservoirs. But short-term storage is already useful, which is why much of it is built in red states like Florida.
***
It's almost noon at Babcock RanchThe first city in the United States to be fully powered by solar energy, and electricity flows in a sea of 330,000 photovoltaic panels on the outskirts of this one-year-old community in southwestern Florida. Syd Kitson, the developer of Babcock, had a crazy vision of a sustainable oasis in a region stifled by urban sprawl, a dream of native vegetation, bike paths, rain gardens, hiking trails, from restaurants from farm to table, from a pedestrian and self-contained downtown. electric buses, all powered by the most abundant natural resource of the Sunshine State. Now this is really happening. The first 200 families moved in, paving the way for a new way of living in the suburbs. FPL's 74.5 megawatt solar panels generate enough clean energy to supply most of the city's juice, even after it reaches the expected size of 50,000.
"Traditional planners still want this stereotypical subdivision. They did not stop asking, "You do not really think so, do you?", Recalls Kitson. "That's what I meant!"
When FPL built the Babcock plant in 2016, she hoped to someday be able to add storage space. The batteries became so cheap so fast that a day arrived last year. In the substation next to the factory, 10 gray containers filled with Samsung batteries capture sunshine in the middle of the day to meet peak demand in the area a few hours later. Residents do not notice these algorithm-controlled machinations that help keep their lights on and their rates low, but they like to be part of an avant-garde experience in a fast-growing region where sustainability is a rude word.
Last March, FPL introduced its 10 megawatt Babcock battery to the rank of the largest storage project ever built next to a solar park in the United States. The utility recently announced a 409-megawatt battery project next to a solar park in Manatee County, four times larger than the largest on earth today. Matt Valle, vice president of development at FPL, makes sure that bigger solutions are put in place when it goes online in 2021, though it may not be 40 times larger. Public services are struggling to dispose of dirty and expensive assets; FPL will close its last coal-fired power plant this year and its new megabyte will allow it to decommission its two less efficient gas plants. The company loved its Babcock solar plant so much that it built 15 identical plants in Florida and has more than 100 others in the pipeline to install 30 million panels by 2030. Low cost storage will allow it to to manage his peaks. and match supply with demand as its network becomes greener.
"It's inevitable that you would see a lot more," says Valle.
In the end, the real power of the battery revolution might not only be how it accelerates the renewable energy revolution, but also how it interacts with the digital revolution. Susan Kennedy launched Advanced Microgrid Systems after being chief of staff to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California because she had a vision of a future where energy could be stored and shipped with extraordinary efficiency and profitability. Her vision could not have come true without cheap batteries, but she sees them as "silent pieces of Tupperware." The real transformation is based on sensors, smart devices and software based on an artificial intelligence that begins to merge the Internet with the network, benefiting from sudden price swings on wholesale energy markets to move electrons to where they are. have the most value, every microsecond of every day. Its software turns batteries into virtual power plants, storing electricity cheaply, so that entire office buildings can stop buying on the grid at peak times. In his speech on wind energy, Trump recognized the vulnerability of renewable energies, even though he exaggerated it: they make it more difficult to instantly balance the grid. But algorithms that analyze a value of terabytes of data per second make it much easier.
Kennedy envisions a future in which algorithms will adjust your smart refrigerator or your smart thermostat by half a degree when your utility needs to suck or spit out some extra juice. Electric vehicles will become car-shaped battery storage devices when they are not in use, supplying the grid with electricity during peak hours and charging when the grid has enough energy. "Smart grids can not be managed by humans with Excel spreadsheets," says Kennedy. "But it's much more efficient than the old network."
The world of energy is the subject of intense debate over whether this new world of digitally optimized batteries will allow the United States to produce 100% renewable (or at least emission-free) electricity. The Green New Deal suggests that this should happen as early as 2030, while California, Hawaii, Washington, and now New Mexico have set targets by 2045. Even optimistic battery experts acknowledge that technologies current short-term storage will not create a fully renewable solution. network, and some doubt that this will ever materialize in areas with low wind, solar and hydroelectric resources without huge investments in transmission lines.
The growing ambition of the Green New Deal has magnified this controversy over the percentage of realistic and reliable renewable energy sources. But so far, the network has managed the rise of renewable energy without much drama, and whether or not ready for 100% renewable energy, everyone agrees that the growth of storage on battery will allow him to handle much more.
"You can turn on your TV," says Speakes-Backman, CEO of the Energy Storage Association. "It's perfect!"
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