HOUSTON - The flourishing innovations for long duration energy storage (LDES) are seen as ‘gridlock breaker’ not just for the perplexing intermittency of variable renewable energy (VRE) facilities, but they could also defray huge capital outlay for warranted grid expansions and upgrades to underpin the energy transition that is happening all over the world.

In a panel discussion at the recently concluded CERAWeek, Long Duration Energy Storage Council CEO Julia Souder indicated “it’s really important that we have long duration energy storage in this new transition…there’s no way possible that we can have massive renewable energy on-line without LDES because we have to have that flexibility.”

She similarly stated that LDES developments - which could range from 8-12 hours and even as long as 100 hours of energy storage – may also thrive as a technology solution to defer warranted billions to trillions worth of investments for the expansion and upgrades of transmission facilities; especially those that are critically needed to underpin massive RE installations.

In many energy markets that are accelerating developments in the RE space, the major conundrum hamstringing the flow of investment-dollars is the lethargic buildup of transmission projects – and that too, has been keeping both investors and policymakers wide awake at night.

“LDES saves money, we have industry studies showing that billions of dollars can be saved because building new transmission lines can take 10-20 years…there’s a lot of savings there, so we will be bringing that forward,” Souder stressed.

She specified that there are already multiple products and technologies being experimented on for prospective commercial-scale deployment of LDES in the years ahead – and these are seen enabling massive and more efficient integration of RE in power systems across markets.

“This diversity of products and technologies that we have today can really make transition happen. There are now factories that are producing LDES products – we are trying to demystify this,” Souder said.

She conveyed her organization is currently working with the Global Renewables Alliance (GRA) “to set strong targets and goals for LDES,” primarily as a lasting solution to the intermittency of solar and wind technologies or to integrate them with innovative technology solutions like green hydrogen.

Policies to enable market-scale rollout

With roughly 130 countries committing to triple RE investments in the last COP28 Climate Change Summit in Dubai, she asserted “there’s no way we can do this without long duration energy storage - that’s what we’ve been working on together, to help them create markets for this trillion-dollar industry.”

In the case of Quebec in Canada, Minister of Economy, Innovation and Energy Pierre Fitzgibbon enthused that the deployment of long duration energy storage capacity helps balance their energy supply, given the seasonality of hydro as well as the intermittency of RE sources like solar.

On top of that, the Energy Minister expounded that LDES is a great part of their solution and strategy when it comes to injecting efficiency into their power system and for Quebec to successfully advance its 2050 net zero goals.

Quebec is one of the major energy markets that has been enabling the aggressive commercial manufacturing of long duration energy storage systems; and the government has also been working on a policy that will extend tax breaks to these technological innovations.

By far, one of the companies advancing the development of LDES is European firm Corre Energy which already deployed demonstration projects in Netherlands, Denmark and Germany as well as Texas in the United States.

The company’s LDES is designed as a grid-scale, hydrogen-fueled compressed air and hydrogen storage in salt caverns and these are seen yielding long asset life of 35 years or even longer – and it can be deployed at relatively low capital costs once scaled for commercial rollout.

In particular, the company is leading the Green Hydrogen Hub project in Denmark which is pioneering the utilization of green hydrogen and compressed air energy storage or CAES; and these are aligned as perfect complement to targeted huge scale RE deployments.

According to Corre Energy North America President Chet Lyons, “the technology is considered by the Global Renewables Alliance to be the best performing from a life cycle cost play,” as he explained that their LDES technology “does require salt caverns – you start with holes in the ground, maybe 1,000 meters down. You take renewable energy like solar and wind – and use that electricity to drive electricity into the air compressor for storage. When it’s already time to use the stored energy, the compressed air is released and rushes out into a turbine.”

He noted that Corre Energy has partnership with German multinational firm Siemens for the deployment of turbines that could yield a multi-day use case for energy storage from a CAES system.

Via that tie-up, Corre Energy and Siemens are eyeing that they can eventually deploy modular and standardized scalable CAES that could provide long duration energy storage to various energy markets.

While experiments on LDES are already gaining traction, advocates as well as the companies and organizations leading the deployment of such solutions are one in saying that government policies must step up into incentivizing the market introduction of these solutions -- that way, hurdles such as capital formation for project financing as well as creating the market for commercial scale deployments could be prudently addressed.

“There are few barriers that we’ve been working through…we have to work with policymakers to change policies to make the right market - what we’re seeing is not just about cost, this is also about savings. We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re just adopting and modifying improvements to bring on a new system,” Souder highlighted.