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Is electricity storage essential? Belief is a dangerous foundation for decision-making and beliefs about storage risk major investment errors
Storage of electricity at grid-scale is widely seen as the essential missing piece in the energy transition puzzle. But is storage essential for a renewable energy future, or even desirable, and what type? Or is it a big added cost without cause?
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Elemental Transitioning to renewable energy requires a modest increase in the volume of overall generating capacity needed to maintain high levels of supply security, but it does not automatically trigger a requirement for more storage capacity
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Storage is widely seen as the essential missing piece in the energy transition puzzle. Only by storing electricity for use when the wind is not blowing and the sun not shining can variable sources of energy form the backbone of a clean power system. Or so the argument goes. Examine the case for storage more closely, however, and it is far from clear cut.
Storage is not essential for guaranteeing reliability of supply on a power system based on renewable energy. Alternatives for managing the ebbs and flows of supply and demand have long been in use and this flexibility remains available when renewable energy replaces fossil fuel and nuclear supply. Moreoever, new digital tools increase the ability to flexibly manage power systems.
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Significantly, not one of the challenges presented by high proportions of renewables has proved insurmountable, or demanded large storage capacities, even on power systems regularly running on all renewable energy for many hours at a time, such as in regions of Europe, North America and elsewhere.
It was more than ten years ago that Denmark’s power system operator produced an analysis demonstrating that the entire western half of Denmark could reliably provide 70% of electricity needs from wind alone without storage and without relying on interconnections to its neighbours or the other half of the country. Trading power across borders, however, is a common sense use of interconnected grid networks, reducing electricity cost for all parties involved. The analysis was an academic exercise not a statement of intent. At the time, the foreseen 70% of wind electricity would require the remaining 30% to come from gas-fired generation.
Since that analysis, Denmark has transitioned to renewable electricity for 54% of its requirements (about 40% of that from wind) and has set a firm course to be totally free of fossil fuel for all its energy needs by 2050, gradually transferring its energy demand for heat and transport to electricity. By 2035 a main scenario has wind supplying 75% of electricity demand (see graph below) and a mixture of other renewables supplying the remainder. Large scale electricity storage within the power system is not part of the country’s plans for meeting its 100% clean energy goal.
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While storage is not essential, stored electricity can be a welcome extra resource on any power system, provided the value of the service is greater than the added cost of generating more electricity as it is needed. For most power system applications, storage fails to meet that criteria. Even on a system entirely reliant on renewable energy, alternatives to storage are cheaper for meeting most needs.
Before electricity can be stored it must be generated and that comes at a cost. Although solar and wind have no fuel costs, they have capital costs to repay and operation and maintenance expenses to cover. The price of the storage hardware, its operating cost and the cost of discharging the stored energy comes in addition to the cost of generating the power in the first place.
Most storage systems take as long to charge as to discharge, meaning they can only generate for less than half the time. Moreover, energy losses occur in both the charge and discharge cycles. Just like any generation technology, storage has a utilisation limit, expressed as a “load factor” or “capacity factor.” For storage, the load factor is unlikely to rise above 40%, which is less than for an offshore wind station, or a wind plant in a windy location on land, and compares with the 85-90% load factor achievable for a gas plant in full operation today. Using stored power will always cost more than using it directly.
These fundamentals of storage economics are non-negotiable. They are not changed by the falling price of batteries or abundant supplies of low-marginal-cost solar and wind.
That truth is blurred, however, when the full cost of storage gets hidden from view. When homeowners pay for their own solar panels and batteries, or the owners of electric vehicles offer storage capability to the grid, the cost of the hardware and running it does not show up in the bill for operating the power system. Indeed, that bill can even fall. If “behind-the-meter” storage reduces demand on the network just when peak use and peak prices occur, the system operator can save money by not having to buy electricity when it is most expensive. That does not mean to say the cost has disappeared. Although hidden from view, the greater cost of storage still exists and is still an item on the national economy. The bill trickles through and the extra cost has to be paid by society, one way or another.
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The same principle applies to large scale storage, even though the benefits of economies of scale mean it is cheaper than home storage. The attraction of buying power when it is cheap and selling it later at peak rates is irrefutable and can represent a compelling market opportunity. The process can take place through energy exchanges, where it is open ended and without an obligation to match sales volumes with purchases, or it can be through interconnectors that link one power system to another.
The wider the spread in prices between rock-bottom, when demand on the system is low and/or renewable energy is in abundance, and peak rates, when demand threatens to outstrip supply, often from the lowest-priced renewables, the more money there is to be made from selling stored electricity.
It is this so-called arbitrage market, essentially an energy exchange process, that commercial storage players have their eyes on. It thrives on the price differential. Arbitrage has been used for many years to maintain constant demand on thermal plant (including nuclear), which operate most efficiently at constant full-load output. Thermal output under threat of curtailment as demand drops is bought at a low price and stored, typically during the night, and resold during the day, when prices are higher. If a system operator owns or has access to sufficient storage, arbitrage can be a micro-economic option.
With storage operating at a 40% load factor, typically costing around $1400 per kilowatt of capacity installed and assuming a 30 year life of the hardware and 6% borrowing rate on the cost of capital involved, storage merchants need to sell their discharged electricity for around €40/MWh more than the price they paid for it, just to break even. Given that fact, it is not surprising that storage suppliers are persuasive in their arguments for market structures that support wide price spreads over a long enough period to make a commercial case for their arbitrage business.
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“Stored electricity can be a useful
extra resource on any power system,
provided its value is greater than
its added cost”
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From the customer’s viewpoint, however, the narrower the price spread the less arbitrage that is required and the lower the average price they pay for electricity. Narrowing that spread without incurring the cost of storage can be achieved by employing cheaper alternatives from the pool of so-called “flexibility” options.
One option is trading power with a neighbouring system, which can be across a national border. Trading adds flexibility for the price of a strengthened interconnection, bringing down costs for everybody long-term. Dynamic shifting of demand away from peak times, is another option. It has long been practised by system operators and well before the arrival of renewable energy.
Grid operators can also contract “demand response” from commercial businesses. These aggregators of system flexibility services pay customers to reduce demand for short periods and aggregate the “negative load” to sell to the system operator. Temporarily adjusting air conditioning or refrigeration quickly reduces spikes in demand with no ill-effects for the user. Commercial aggregators of demand response create different sized products as required. Rapid advances in digital technology and development of the “energy internet” is making it ever easier and cheaper to manage demand, presenting storage with a tough flexibility competitor. •
TEXT Lyn Harrison & David Milborrow illustration Hvass & Hannibal
This article is part one of our five-part special report on grid-scale electricity storage. Find parts one-five linked below or get the key takeaways at a glance
Special report - Electricity Storage part 2/5: Filling in for wind and solar over days of calm and cloudy weather is not a task storage can perform, even if it was a power system requirement
Special report - Electricity Storage part 3/5: By relieving grid bottlenecks of surplus supply and providing bursts of power when needed, storage can add sufficient value to find routes to profitability, but they are limited
Special report - Electricity Storage part 4/5: No means of affordably storing large volumes of electricity in all geographies exists, but a robust grid, connected over a wide area, can deliver green energy reliability
Special report - Electricity Storage part 5/5: The uptake of renewable energy does not increase the need for storage capacity, but stored power can help grid operators flexibly operate power systems, provided it can pay its way
Essential knowledge and key indicators of the prospects for grid scale electricity storage technologies
Thank you for your article. When you mention “Using stored power will always cost more than using it directly”, what about in the current energy transition, when overnight prices of power are negative – i.e. when demand is low and coal/nuclear generators have very high shutdown/startup cost. Their negative offers represent very real power system economics, and storage technologies (be it pump hydro or batteries) are paid for their consumption, and later for their production. To the society, of course, the lifetime cost of this energy is higher (production+storage+release), yet the reality of the operational constraints of generation technologies come into the picture when assessing whether storage has a place in a modern grid. It might or it might not (and according to the market it does in some cases), but a blanket “always costs more” can be misleading. In your example of arbitrage, consider this, and also the rapidly decreasing costs and technologies in batteries. As an example, a price spread of -$30 to $40 will yield lower customer prices than a price spread of $30 to $40. Whether the value storage provide is higher than the cost is perhaps best left to the market, or whether flexibility is best suited (appropriate market products for flexibility will likely be required).
And thank-you for your thoughtful and interesting comment. Here at FORESIGHT we couldn’t agree with you more, especially about letting the market decide when and where the value of storage is higher than its added cost. That is exactly our point. Rather than governments stepping in to support uptake of storage, far better that market demand determines when storage makes overall economic sense for society.
I understand why you question our statement that storing electricity always adds cost. But as your question makes clear, cost and price are two different quantities. The cost of storing and releasing the power comes in addition to the cost of producing it. Either this cost is included in the price of electricity, or as price-support paid by consumers as taxpayers. One way or another, as you point out, it is the consumer who pays. In your example of price spreads, it strikes me as unlikely that stored green electricity will be offered at lower negative prices than electricity offered by fossil/nuclear generators. Burdened as they are by the high shutdown/startup cost you refer to, it can make financial sense to avoid this cost by paying a lesser price to offload their generation, unlike providers of stored electricity. Any generator will need to recoup its negative-price losses by jacking up the price of its product another time. The higher the loss, the higher the subsequent price. Renewable energy will also need to make up for periods of low or negative prices. All this adds cost for the consumer, costs that a narrow price spread can avoid.
If my observation of energy markets and energy policy over the past 35 years has taught me nothing else, it is that governments are wont to step in and tweak market regulations to avoid or achieve specific outcomes, whether to benefit producers, consumers or their popularity with voters. But no longer can energy be subject to the vagaries of politics and policy errors. We need holistic and far-sighted policies focused on a fast and affordable energy transition. A misguided belief in the need for storage is just one market-tweak-risk among many. Stimulating over-investment in storage services will add unnecessary cost to the energy transition. It will rob cheaper and better flexibility solutions of market opportunities. The pace of global warming does not give us the time to indulge in such expensive diversions, nuclear among them.
Lyn Harrison, special report editor
This article contains some rather questionable assertions. For example, the statement that 1) “Large scale electricity storage within
the power system is not part of the country’s plans for meeting its 100%
clean energy goal.” But does that plan not include the continued importing of large amounts of stored hydropower from Sweden and Norway? That is, please explain to me how, w/o a major biofuel breakthrough, one can truly achieve 100% renewable energy from inherently intermittent sources w/o some form of storage.
Or how about, 2) “Using stored power will always cost more than using it directly.” Are you comparing apples to oranges? That is, wind is now falling linearly but solar and battery storage costs are still falling logarithmically. So, what happens if the LCOE of solar/wind + storage drops below all fossil fuels? Would statement 2) still be true? Frankly, I don’t see how.
Moreover, nothing talks like money, but beyond current and projected market forecasts, the statement that, 3) “Even on a system entirely reliant on renewable energy, alternatives to storage are cheaper for meeting most needs.” begs the question, “Cheaper for who and how long?” For today’s utilities and investors? How about the price to sustain a techno-based civilization?
That is, we now generate a continuous 18 terawatts of waste heat, while fossil fuel combustion has altered the Earth’s energy budget enough to trap perhaps 400 continuous terawatts of excess heat. Thus, we’re living with a trapped to waste heat ratio above 20. Yet, how can one deny that the long-term ratio for a sustainable civilization is not zero? With a projected 50% increase in the world’s population w/i this century, what that ratio implies is that 75% or even 90% renewable will not suffice. So, even if storage is and will remain more expensive (a dubious claim), it looks to me like either pay now, or pay a lot more later.
Some good observations here and I would like to add on your point 1):
This is true and in reality import/export of electricity is not a viable solution in the long-term, when neighbouring countries will also have excess amounts of variable renewable generation at certain points of time.
However, the point is that at a system-scale it is cheaper to use thermal storage in Denmark (2 orders of magnitude cheaper than grid battery storage) plus there is also a possibility for the last step to use ultra cheap liquid fuel storage (produced via electrolysis and different synthesis processes, which production is still super expensive today).
But one would definitely like to charge batteries in (future) vehicles via smart charging, and not via on-demand charging. That would already significantly integrated vast amounts of variable renewable energy sources.
So my conclusion would be, storage will be needed but not necessarily in the form of grid-battery storage.
Best
Dominik
[…] Part I: The not so essential role of electricity storage […]
Yes stored energy will be more expensive than direct energy. The question is : by how much? Right now the answer is probably “a huge amount”, with no hope of a breakthrough in sight despite decades of research. So with no viable storage available, we see the recourse to imposing renewables onto unwilling consumers by subsidies and forced mandates.
So, sensibly recognising the insurmountable storage hurdle, you (Foresight) look to broad interconnectedness with smart switching in and out of sources. Fine in theory, but is it viable? Or does it too need political privileges that hammer the citizenry ?
[…] Note from editor: While storage is widely seen as the essential missing piece in the energy transition puzzle, FORESIGHT believes that on closer examination the case for storage is far from clear cut. Read our in-depth analysis of the issue here. […]
[…] Read more […]