Storage and the Energy Transition
Storage technologies are essential to the electrical grid as ever more renewable generating resources are added. Start here to learn the basics of how the grid works and to understand why energy storage is so important.
2024 was yet another sobering year for the planet, the warmest in human history according to the UN (2023 had set the previous record). Extreme climate events have become unremarkable. With some 80% of the world's energy still coming from fossil fuels, the need to fundamentally rethink energy use was never more stark. The political will to face up to the challenge is waning in many quarters.
Yet in spite of the despair that many feel, there's an irreversible momentum to the energy transition, particularly in electrification. Global solar deployment continues to outpace even the most bullish forecasts. Wind and solar are more economical than legacy power generation by an ever-increasing margin. The build out of battery storage is proceeding at astonishing rates. Grid enhancing technologies continue to evolve to facilitate ever-increasing ratios of renewable energy. The share of new power generation deployments in Solar/Wind/Battery configurations is 90% plus - even where the prevailing political mood is oppositional.
The economics are no longer marginal and clean energy is simply outcompeting the fossil fuel industry. Geopolitics has provided an additional motivation for electrification in the twin concerns of Energy Security and Energy Independence. Solar/storage configurations and microgrids have emerged as a real force in economies and communities, whether rich or less well-off. Thanks to these developments, there's a credible path to Energy Security and Energy Independence in even the poorest and most marginalised of economies.
Many challenges remain according as new demand categories emerge (AI, HPs and EVs etc - we'll post on these later). Nonetheless, we are living through a period where energy use is being reimagined in one of the great historical infrastructure transformations. This movement impacts energy producers and consumers, technologists, designers & infrastructure builders, communities, governments and entire regions. It presents enormous business opportunity for players right through the supply chain across every sector.
Electrification is critical to Net Zero and the electrical grid is at the core of this transformation. In this blog, we try to explain in summary terms how the grid has worked historically. We describe how its operators rely on a variety of energy sources and techniques to ensure that consumers can draw power as they need. We'll talk repeatedly about the concept of the Decarbonized Grid (i.e. the grid as it transitions to ever higher ratios of clean energy). We're in the energy storage business, but we make a genuine attempt to keep this factual and agnostic.
If you're unfamiliar with electrical grids, start here & follow the thread to read our simplified account of their architecture and operations. We outline how renewables present new challenges, the different ways in which storage is critical to a decarbonized grid, and why we believe distributed storage will become a significant asset class on the path to Energy Security.