Energy storage industry growing with new battery gigafactories
Research and development in energy storage have given us a whole gamut of storage battery concepts, including lithium-ion, lead acid, sodium chemistries, and flow technologies. This has made clean energy battery storage a fast-growing industry.
Taking the lead from Tesla’s gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, where the company plans on producing enough storage batteries to support their planned vehicle demand, countries in Europe have jumped on the bandwagon, announcing plans for large-scale factories in Germany, Sweden, Hungary, and Poland, reports Bloomberg.
As Digital Journal pointed out earlier this month, storage battery technology is vitally important; to not only drive the next generation of green vehicles but in storing electricity from wind and solar farms.
Global drivers of energy storage
The automotive industry has become a powerful driver in the development of the lithium-air storage battery used in electric vehicles, while at the same time, opening the door to significant developments in lithium storage and hybrid solar cell storage batteries.
Power, the official publication of Electric Power, reports that battery storage has gone mainstream, and that is evident in Germany today. On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel attended the groundbreaking at a 500 million-euro ($543 million) plant to assemble lithium-ion energy storage units for Daimler AG.
The construction of the facility signals a push by both automakers and electric power companies into energy storage. And according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, with both of these dominant industries moving in the same direction, the cost of the batteries is going to plummet.
“As battery costs fall and their energy density increases, we could see cheaper battery-electric cars than their fuel-burning equivalents by 2030,” said Nikolas Soulopoulos, an analyst with the London-based research arm of Bloomberg LP.
For utility companies, less costly batteries reduce the overall cost of storage units used to even-out the variable flows of electric power to the grid from renewables. Enel SpA, the biggest distributor in Italy, recently paired batteries with a wind farm and the grid managers saw improved output by as much as 30 percent.
