All right, we're started. Rebecca Martineau, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Thank you. Hello, everyone and welcome to today’s webinar: Conversations in Energy Storage Integration. This is day one of this seminar, and introduction to energy storage integration. We have a great line-up of speakers here today to discuss how collaborative research is critical to addressing challenges in energy storage. Before we get started, I’m just gonna go over these
few housekeeping items. You’re probably listening using your computer speaker system. And if you want to dial in, I believe there is an option for that. We’re taking questions today via the Q&A function at the bottom of your control panel. But we do encourage you to focus on saving questions for the panel discussion at the end of the session.
We are recording today’s webinar, and you will receive a follow up e-mail within a few weeks with a link to view the recording. With that, I’d like to introduce today’s moderator Dr. Ahmad Pesaran. Ahmad has worked at NREL on thermal engineering of energy systems, energy efficient technologies, and batteries for electrified vehicles over the last 37 years. Between 2007 and 2016, he was the NREL energy storage group manager. He was on
offsite assignment with DOE’s vehicle technologies office in 2016 through 2018. He currently supports vehicle technologies office battery R&D team with battery processing, manufacturing solid electrolyte and local alt cathode projects. All right, Ahmad, I will turn it over to you. Dr. Ahmad Pesaran, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Thank you, Erica. Thank you for your introduction. This is Ahmad Pesaran, as you mentioned. I would like to welcome all of you from behalf of NREL, and also
energy conversion and energy storage systems. And I think the purpose of introduction is to kind of – as you can see all the speakers providing different perspective from different organizations on the energy storage and how they should be integrated or have the opportunity to integrating them together so that that some of them to be larger than each one. And I think the energy storage technologies, each one, each technology like thermal or chemical has made a lot of progress. And I think that we got to the point that kind of maybe we can – if you have _____ and integrate them, we get more out of them, right, for the grid and decarbonization of the grid, and achieving the climate change for our future. So without further ado, I would like to introduce Maggie Mann, _____ speaker. Erica, do you have slides to share from this morning, or –? Rebecca Martineau: Yeah. Sorry. I thought you had them. Let me pull them up. [Crosstalk]
Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: So Maggie is our manager for Mobility Infrastructure and Impacts Analysis at NREL. She has been at NREL for a while, for a long time, and has been a good colleague of mine. And she has background in chemical engineering, and she now leads the _____ for analysis and _____ different technologies, particularly batteries. So my introduction to energy storage integration. So Maggie, go ahead.
Maggie Mann, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Thank you very much, Ahmad. And good morning to everyone. It’s quite snowy here. And I am super glad to be working from home. [Laughter] Something I don’t say everyday these days. But I hope you’re well where you are, and I’m glad that we were able to have this conversation. I just wanted to confirm that what you’re seeing is the presentation mode for my presentation? Rebecca Martineau: Yes.
Maggie Mann: Okay. And if I do that, does it switch to the not presentation mode? Rebecca Martineau: Yep. Maggie Mann: Okay. So I won’t do that. [Laughter] All right. Thank you. So Jen Kurtz asked me to just show few slides to get us kicked off and oriented toward the need for integrated energy storage. We know that we have a lot of goals that need to be met with our
current challenges facing us, particularly for decarbonization, energy efficiency, demand for greater amount of power in the integration of the transportation sector with our electricity sector. We have great resilience challenges. And of course we have the growing needs for repairing and upgrading our infrastructure around energy systems. And we can’t reliably and consistently meet these needs with our current energy system. So we know that there are multiple technologies available for energy storage at different timescales. There is the short duration, very quick response, batteries that are available all the way to a very long timescale duration, long duration energy storage technologies, as well as many that are emerging.
But what we also know is that isolated technology development for not only the individual energy storage technologies, but also for the clean energy technologies we’re going to rely on, won’t be enough, and that we need to integrate these technologies and integrate energy storage with these clean energy technologies in order to solve the challenges that are in front of us. ARIES is a research platform at NREL that is seeking to accelerate the transition to this modern energy system located at our Flatirons campus between Golden and Boulder. It has space and power levels available to integrate systems at scales that really matter in order to test them in real world conditions, in integrated ways that may be seen in multiple locations across multiple timescales out there in the real world as we move to this future modern energy system. We also know that these challenges are important in multi-dimensional. And then talking with the – sorry, let me just get rid of that, making sure conversations exist between government, industry, and academia are critical for making sure that the collaborative research is formed and addressed to address these challenges. And we think the ARIES as well as platforms such as this seminar can facilitate some of that engagement and collaboration.
So this seminar series has an objective of increasing impact by not only sharing information, research, technology information, but also making those connections. And in informing our future work, we hope to develop not only collaboration, but also partnerships in order to bring together the best minds, the best technologies, and the best institutions. Thank you very much. I look forward to participating in today’s seminar and tomorrow’s discussion as well. Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: Thank you, Maggie. I appreciate it, putting the perspective right
so that we can get in discussion. Our next speaker that is going to talk is Eric Hsieh. And sorry if I made _____ wrong. So he’s the director of the Energy System and Component at Office of Electricity in the Department of Energy. Eric is project leader, also manages the Energy Storage Grand Challenge that’s operating across cross collaboration across DOE, and _____ program _____ _____ optimization _____ utilization of energy storage technologies. And I
think he has looked at all different technologies under his Grand Challenge. Previously, he was a member of _____ companies, and also Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Eric is gonna talk, I’m sure, talk about Grand Challenge and long duration storage energy _____. So Eric, please go ahead. Eric Hsieh, U.S. Department of Energy: Great. Thank you for that invitation and thank you for
the chance to share some thoughts about how DOE is addressing the need for sort of a step change improvement in energy storage technologies. Can you make sure my screen appears okay? You got a full screen from my slide? Rebecca Martineau: Looks great. Eric Hsieh: Great. Thank you. Great. So just continuing on the theme of collaboration that
Maggie introduced for us. I’m gonna talk about how DOE is looking at energy storage and collaboration. So I think this is not news to anyone on this call, but I think it’s useful to help set up some of the magnitude of the challenges that we face. So if we look at the 2035 and 2050 decarbonization goals for the administration, getting there will require massive amounts of more storage or flexible, clean flexible capacity.
So anywhere from 40 times to 100 times more than we have today. And as Maggie mentioned, storage includes a range of functions provided by many technologies. So DOE’s storage work is found across more than half a dozen labs, and over a dozen – sorry, half a dozen offices and over a dozen labs. And successful storage deployment is going to require the full range of R&D deployment manufacturing and institutional support. All of these need to occur as a package and coordinated with each other in order for us to grow this industry fast enough. And it’s really gonna require, within DOE, collaboration across
traditional DOE boundaries, across offices, and across institutional boundaries with the industry. So to give people sort of an idea of what this magnitude is, if you look at what we have today, it’s actually quite – give me a second, it’s almost daunting. So this very thin blue dark blue line is to scale the batteries that were deployed at the end of 2020. So that’s about 3.5 gigawatts, 8.7 gigawatt hours, so on average they’re about three hours and change in duration. And this longer blue line is this pump storage deployed in the US as of 2020. So 22 gigawatts, 550 gigawatt hours, so on average about 25 hours. If you look at business as usual
scenarios of what might be built in the relatively medium-term future, 2030, you’d see a fairly sizeable growth in batteries. So depending on which analyst you’re looking at, you could have 65 gigawatts or 235 gigawatt hours of batteries that represents almost a 30 times increase in what we have now. And then if everything currently in the pump storage development pipeline is built, then we would get something on the order of 50 gigawatts and 1,300 gigawatts, so 2.5 times over what we have today. Depending on where, you know, who you are looking at in terms of decarbonization scenarios, we might need to anywhere from 300 to 800 gigawatts of storage. That represents 1,200 to 1,400 gigawatt hours. So that is fairly, fairly – like many, many times more than we have today. And then if you’re looking at 2050 when seasonal storage becomes even more important, you know, some models model this as a clean dispatchable technology.
Others explicitly now model it as an energy storage technology. You’re talking, again, another several hundred gigawatt hours of very, very long duration technology. Now the point of showing these requirements is that it’s really pointing to the technical need for portfolio storage technology. So you have you have a subset of the capacity that’s going to be cycled daily. So less than 12 hours in duration, it’s
going to address most of the diurnal variations in the load shape, in that load shape. And when you’re talking about this type of duration, there will be a lot of benefits for being located closer to load, especially for resilience in that the vast majority of interruptions are of a short enough duration that this kind of capacity in duration would be better addressed then, and then the faults would be cleared by the time you would need to have the opportunity to recharge. When you’re looking at storage that is very long in duration, you know, a hundred hours or hundreds of hours, these are going to be cycled maybe weekly or monthly, or even less. And when you get to those kinds of operations, the resilience benefits become a little bit less because you don’t have quite as many outages in terms of frequency that lasts that long. But you do have
geographic extended benefits, so in terms of being able to access different parts of the country to take advantage of different availabilities or load patterns throughout seasons. And so that starts to point to different requirements for both scale and geographic portability, and potentially even efficiency. And so it’s sort of the envelope of what you might tolerate would be very different. So what do we need to do to get there? There is a DOE Energy Source Grand Challenge costs performs report that’s in the process of being updated. So it’s expanding its sort of business-as-usual cost projections from about four storage technologies today to about a dozen. Once the 2022 version is released. And it sets up some, you know, business-as-usual expectations for what a storage system might cost in 2030. And a lot of them show some performance improvements,
but there will still be a gap between where we think storage technologies might go independent of R&D interventions, and where they really need to get to in terms of levelized costs storage in order for decarbonization to occur in a way that minimizes rate impacts to end users. Despite the gap, you know, I think there are many technologies for which the underlying materials costs are so low that R&D is a credible cost reduction strategy. So with that, it gives me a chance to mention the Long Duration Storage Shots. So the Long Duration Storage Shot is one of the DOE’s Earthshots that has been set up by this administration and it is managed by the Energy Storage Grand Challenge. And the target is intuitively easy to explain. We are basically are trying to target the storage levelized cost that would allow you to move energy from time A to time B by adding less than five cents a kilowatt hour. If we get to that point,
then dependable clean energy becomes competitive with existing energy sources. So the other shot really leverages the Energy Storage Grand Challenge use case framework, which was first unveiled a little more than a year ago, where we began to put into place this use case-based R&D coordination strategy. So instead of saying we need to advance a certain technology along a particular set of dimensions or metrics, we instead set up a group of half a dozen use cases, each with their own technology cost and performance requirements, and then work backwards from there to identify, to allow for any of the technologies that have a shot of meeting them to be part of the Storage Grand Challenge. So what the Long Duration Storage Earthshot does is elevates two of them. One is facilitating grid decarbonization, so that is the decarbonizing grid use case, as well as serving remote communities. So
communities that are weakly-connected or not connected at all to the bulk power system, and making sure that they also have access to reliable clean energy. So some thoughts about DOE’s storage collaboration and how we got there. So a little bit of kind of history, but I think it illustrates how an institution sort of organically recognizes an issue and begins to sort of self-organize in a way that is clear and more productive. So prior to 2018, there had been informal storage working groups within the department. So ARPA-E Energy
Efficiency, OE, and the Office of Science were major participants. And then there was also this initiative called Beyond Batteries from EERE, and to coordinate sort of storage-related, the activities within EE. In early 2019, OE and the Office of Electricity, my office, and EERE, proposed the Advanced Energy Storage Initiative, which is probably like the first sort of formally proposed coordination structure in that it appeared in our budget request. Sort of very closely following that, we’re actually told by Congress through their Research and Technology Investment Act to put together crosscutting groups for major technology issues.
And the first one of course that was chosen was storage, and that became the Energy Storage Grand Challenge in 2020. And that now encompasses all of the offices that have anything to do with storage from basic energy sciences in SD, to the more deployment-focused activities in offices like the Office of Tech Transition and the Loans Programs Office. And in 2021, so last July, the Energy Storage Grand Challenge was used to launch the Long Duration Storage Shot. So a little bit more of a detail on what the ESGC is. So instead of continuing to sort of propagate the existing stovepipes within DOE, we identified five main tracks for which there would be crosscutting interests, and that were critical to the advancement of the storage industry.
So the first track is technology development, and that’s to track _____. And here we want to maximize the pace of storage innovation through ambitious goals and rigorous metrics, and focused on the use cases that I had presented earlier. The second is manufacturing and supply chain, looking to lower manufacturing costs, accelerate the scale-up of manufacturing innovations, and enable the reliable source being of critical materials.
The next three move from technology-focused tracks to very much more crosscutting issues. So for example, technology transition includes enhancing access to experts facilities and intellectual property, industry and market analysis, like the cost reduction graphs that you saw earlier, and in collaboration and engagement with the industry. Policy evaluation while probably a smaller resource activity especially critical for storage.
You know, giving technical assistance to support energy effective storage policies or storage relevant policies has been one of major enablers to storage deployment recently as well, as providing assistance in planning and regulatory processes. And finally recognized that developing the broad workforce for R&D in DOE manufacturing operation is going to be necessary to scale this industry to the levels that I showed on the first graph, which is, you know, showing orders of magnitudes of growth. And all of these tracks have their own laboratory working groups, and we have regular contributors from over a hundred lab staff from nearly every lab doing work in energy storage. And I very much appreciate the expertise being contributed there. So a little bit of a tour through why this kind of coordination is necessary. So if you look at the continuum of activities from foundational efforts materials out to demo and evaluation, and then to commercialization, institutional, or market development, we cover the gamut. But the need to be well-coordinated is probably very important. So you have, you know, efforts from basic energy science that are probably broadly applicable to many technologies, and you kind of split off into the technology-specific offices like nuclear fossil, Office of Electricity, or EERE, trying to get individual technologies to sort of the first of a kind or applied demo stage. And then things are joined back together as you
get to commercialization, institutional, or get more crosscutting activities. And finally market development, trying to pave the way to make sure that these two technologies really do have commercial demand, and can be not just scaled from a technical perspective, but scaled from the perspective of the market actually pulling them into adoption. So an example of where these kinds of collaborations through the ESG structure have been really fruitful is the AMO and the OE flow battery FOA that was awarded late last fall.
And this is an example of an opportunity that really leverages the strengths of the different offices. So there’s the advanced manufacturing office within EERE that’s focused on innovative manufacturing capabilities, technologies, and practices, looking to scale-up new manufacturing techniques, and looking to streamline and secure our supply chains. And on the other hand, there’s OE focused for a very long time specifically on stationary grid energy storage, and has built up a sizable capability in terms of validating new technologies for this specific application or set of applications. So what this funding does is leverages, you know, it ultimately selected four companies to work on sort this middle area of materials to product assembly. And what it leverages is the sort of, the prototypes that would come from
these project performers, but then be validated at scale at the DOE National Labs that OE has supported to ensure that they would perform for the entire intended application. So it, again, leverages sort of AMO strengths in manufacturing, and OE’s collaborative strengths in testing and validation in a way that I think is efficient and very – will be very effective for this industry. I’ll talk a little bit more about another cross cutting activity, storage technical systems and regulatory support. This will also be a joint office activity looking at regulatory market and policy decisions to drive deployment. The barrier here is often informational, so providing advanced data tools and analysis will help stakeholders identify, you know, what storage, if any, would be optimal and beneficial for them.
And then help them identify how storage would be beneficial to their broader energy system. So roughly three stages of developing resources, then engaging in analytical and technical assistance, and finding ways to help specific groups of stakeholders increase their capabilities and also learn from each other through the dissemination of best practices. And then I want to give a note to establishing connections throughout the labs. And we heard
earlier about ENREL’s new ARIES facility, and I think it’s an important part of the overall portfolio of lab capabilities that have been built up over the past decades that will really accelerate energy storage development. So if you go from solution creators, academia, early stage innovators, material suppliers, there are a whole host of capabilities from MERF at Oak Argonne, to Grid C at Oak Ridge, to the new grid storage launchpad at PNNL, that are designed to solve the known and unknown problems in terms of getting a concept from a paper or benchtop scale to the next stage. And I think ARIES and other labs sort of it at this integration stage is perfectly positioned to make sure a lot of the – more of these concepts can perform as designed and will work well when integrated into larger systems so that they will be ready for the deployment enablers at the end, like automakers, or utilities, investors, and others. I also do want to mention that the Energy Storage Grand Challenge is working to further the ability of the labs so that they’re connected with industry. So if we have a concept or prototype, can you be matched with the most appropriate DOE and lab capability to accelerate that to deployment? So earlier – sorry in back in September of last year, we launched the Energy Storage Grand Challenge specific portal on the Office of Technology transition’s lab partnering service.
So, you know, the preliminary database is up there, but we hope to augment and increase them this year. There are literally hundreds of listings of individual experts and facilities, and other capabilities, and it is designed to make it as seamless as possible for someone who has an idea, but maybe also a barrier in this industry to find someone who can help them work through it and get them to market as quickly as possible. I’m gonna stop. I am gonna end with just a note on the formal storage collaboration points sort of throughout DOE. So if think of our DOE sort of pseudo venture capitalist cycle as going from outreach to strategy development out to funding and program project reviews, there are many opportunities for collaboration. You know, there’s for example, program strategy, development that’s often derived from DOE level goals so that we’re all on the same page. There are DOE-wide crosscut coordination. So Energy Storage Grand Challenge is one of them, but
there are also other ones are related to the grid as well as AI. Of course all of you are aware of the collaborations that go on especially through project reviews, and that offices help each other. And then I will also note that the Congress requires the DOE Electricity Advisory Committee to perform a review of the performance storage activities every two years. So that’s another opportunity for external sort of formal feedback on the way we’re doing things. And I’ll close with an illustration of the cast of hundreds that supports this effort. So currently, we have set up a laboratory coordination effort for Energy Storage Grand Challenge that’s led by four labs, but includes participation, again, as we mentioned from all the ones leading energy storage innovation efforts. And without them, none of this could work as effectively as it does.
So with that, thank you for the opportunity to speak, and I’ll turn it back to our moderator. Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: Thank you, Eric. It was great providing this perspective on DOE and all the activities going on. It’s a lot going on. I think would be good to continue _____ doing that. Collaboration is important as you mentioned, especially the challenges ahead of us with the categorization of the grid. Our next speaker is Jen Kurtz. She’s my center director and my boss. So it’s a very pleasure to introduce her. She led this effort of these conversations for
energy storage seminar series, this first one, and gonna continue future ones. We’ll let you know. Jen leads the Energy Conversion and Storage Center, which look at many different aspects of the disciplinary technologies, and she’s gonna talk about that. I think more than that, she is also involved in the ARIES Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems. She is actually leading that, and she has two hats and two big hats, a big job. And before that, Jen was involved in Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Systems. So Jen, please go ahead. Pleasure to have you here.
Jen Kurtz, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Yeah, thanks so much. Let me just share my screen here. And if you could just let me know that you’ve got the presentation of slides? Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: Yep. Yep, I see that. Thank you.
Jen Kurtz: All right. Very good. Well, thanks for joining us today. We’re so excited to have you here. Eric, it was a really great kind of set-up of what the DOE vision is around Energy Storage, the Grand Challenge, the wide range of aspects of that Grand Challenge that you’re tackling. So
thanks so much for giving us that perspective. What I’d like to do is just share with you how ENREL’s Energy Conversion and Storage Systems Research Center is tackling some of these challenges around energy storage solutions. One of the things that we – one of our touchstones is this phrase “Clean and affordable energy when and where it is needed” is something in in terms of a vision that we connect with and look to see how we as a research center can support that vision. We recognize we’re just one small piece into all of the opportunities here and challenges.
And then throughout the presentation, I’ve got some images here. So I just want to let you know one of the – this particular image is actually looking at the streamlines representing lithium ions and the electrolyte phase as ions travel through pores between the solid active material particles. That’s just setting the stage a little bit for some of the research that we’re doing that that connects, Eric, as you were talking about, with that wide range of activities all the way from the basic material science to the commercialization and application of this.
So we’re thinking about this clean and affordable energy when and where it’s needed, and coming to the challenge, Eric really laid this out so well. But we need energy storage solutions, and we need them quickly. We have ambitious decarbonization goals. We have ambitious goals that are looking at just energy systems no matter where you are, who you are, and what your background is. Those are our pushing us with a sense of urgency. Right? And so our priority within our research
center and connecting across multiple labs and partners is how do we advance, how do we support this challenge through research activities? And so we’re thinking to set the stage for this conversation today and tomorrow is that isolated technology advancements aren’t going to be fast enough. Right? They’re not gonna help us drive towards these big ambitious goals soon enough. Twenty thirty-five, Eric mentioned for decarbonized grid. That means that we need to have solution sets that are ready to be deployed into the marketplace much sooner than 2035 if we’re going to hit that goal. And so we’re coming from the perspective that, sure, there’s technology advancements, and if we just let it take its course, it would it would certainly solve challenges, just not at the rate that we need them to be addressed at. Right? So we’re working on R&D for technology advancement that span electrochemical, molecular thermal, and mechanical energy storage systems and conversion opportunities. So within the water research space, we’re looking at hydro, marine energy, and water systems. And
then there’s thermal research looking that concentrated solar power and thermal – solar thermal fuels and storage, geothermal process heat. And there’s batteries and study materials to manufacturing the durability and reliability of batteries like solid state ion batteries. And then we also have hydrogen production and integration, and fuels cell safety and storage. And what we’re looking at here, this is just one of those things that helps remind us of some of our goals, right, our vision. And this is a hot springs blue pool in Aspen, Colorado. So really connecting in with the geothermal place. So as I started, or as I stated,
isolated technology advancement, we don’t think it’s going to be fast enough. This slide is an illustrative example of our approach of our strategy to tackle the kind of ENREL’s contribution into supporting advancements in energy storage and conversion. And I’m thinking about it from the integration perspective, thinking about it from a holistic systems view. Understanding the different technologies, different sectors, and also readiness levels of where we are with technology. So we’re looking at this cohesive approach to help us develop solution sets that can also – that can work with both legacy and new technologies, and also help us build and accelerate any advancements that are happening in kind of the national lab space into the marketplace.
And with this, you know, here’s an example where we may be looking at electrochemical storage and also factoring in the duration of energy storage needs, whether we’re looking at stationary applications, mobile applications, how we factor in controllable loads, and other energy storage solutions that help us, especially when we get a future energy system with really high levels of renewables. And so we think that from a systems view there are a lot of opportunities. And I want to break down a little bit, provide you a couple of examples of the research space that we’re working in right now, and how we’re tackling these problems. So first off, as we’re thinking about integration, we recognized that are the requirements are going to drive our R&D priorities. We’re connected, of course,
closely with the DOE activities and the priorities. So I think you’ll see some consistency with setting up from what Erica showed us with the Energy Storage Grand Challenge. And these requirements hit on the temporal and spatial needs. Right? Do we need the short-term or the long-term energy storage? Where does that need to be geographically located? And then of course low cost and available to all, and then without sacrificing any of the safety or reliability for these systems. And then as I think about this that a major part of our vision that’s helping to set our research strategy and priorities is how this can get applied into the marketplace. And so we have to be thinking about the demonstration and deployment aspects of energy storage technologies.
So in the context of our thinking about the different pieces of requirements, what are some of the holistic system needs that drive some of the research opportunities that we’re looking at for energy storage and conversion? Scalable and flexible. This is necessity. I think, Eric, one of your first slides really hit on the challenge, right, [laughter] of how big and how long we need to store and shift energy between generation and demand. We need to be thinking about the individual homes, apartment buildings, small communities, all the way up to a bulk generation. And so some examples of what research activities that we have going on right now connecting in for thermal and electrochemical energy storage is Behind-the-meter Storage Research Project. Integrating commercial buildings, energy storage, electric vehicles to understand, evaluate, and optimize how different loads can provide flexible energy flow to the grid, and also balance with other things like renewable generation onsite.
And then like the image that we see here, this is an old sawmill in Maine, and it’s been retrofitted with the hydro turbine fish-friendly opportunity by Natel Energy. And so this hits on the partnerships and the hydropower research that we have thinking about and studying the dispatchable aspects of the operation for hydropower, and how we can quickly a pull the stored energy back to where we need it. One of the next things that we think about, or a set of requirements that we think about is the safety and resiliency. So what we have active research in right here with the safe and resilient set of requirements is looking at things like understanding the science of safety for advanced energy storage technologies. Batteries and hydrogen come to mind right away with our research activities that we have there.
And for instance, studying the mechanisms and monitoring systems in a wide range of performance characteristics – or performance conditions, excuse me. We’re also looking at how integrated energy storage could actually provide a multi-layered line of defense to support grid resiliency. Again, energy storage, we’re coming at it from the perspective that it can complement whole system performance benefits and ride out through disruptions, through catastrophic events, whether it be an extreme weather event like we saw in Texas, or wildfires, that safe and resilient is such a key aspect of the research activities that we have going on. And so we also are looking at how the different energy systems, energy storage systems can be operated in such a way to help with the enhanced resiliency of our grid, especially our future decarbonized grid. And then durable and reliable. These two requirements really have, you know, work hand-in-hand. And we are working on research to understand the
material and the component performance in particular stressors, understanding those factors that lead to the degradation. And that’s through different research projects where looking at predictive durability models. And then also understanding how different operating conditions can either drive issues with durability or opportunities in the hybridization. And so, you know, we’re looking on the thermal side, for example, looking at dynamics thermal cycling, and the response of the cycling units and where we have some failures based on the dynamic cycling. And then we’re also looking at, you know, characterization of things like lithium ion batteries, and understanding where those degradation mechanisms are and how to avoid those particular challenges. Affordable and accessible are two things that we have to have.
And this is something that we are talking about on a pretty regular basis. Right? If we come up with a great technological solution in the lab, and it still doesn’t have the ability to fit into a system to be used by all, and have that accessibility for all people to participate and benefit from it, we still haven’t really pushed far enough into the solution set that we need for energy storage and conversion technologies. So a part of our research strategy in supporting DOE and partners is looking at what are those metrics? So certainly there’s cost research metrics. How do we drive down costs and kind of from the national lab perspective. And sometimes it’s material. Sometimes it’s related to understanding higher opportunity, economic opportunities for different technologies.
I’m thinking about some research that we’re doing right now in geothermal, where we’re reducing, looking to reduce field development costs through increasing drilling efficiency and drilling rates for instance. Also connecting in with hydrogen research and a long duration storage financial analyst tool that helps us understand that full range of technoeconomic opportunities. And with the research like this, it’s driving us towards high opportunity, system configurations, and operating conditions that help us really connect and consider this affordable and accessible. There’s certainly a scale-up that that matters here with affordability too, and how do we drive down costs not only through some of the basic science work in materials and in individual technologies, but how can we pull them together, how can we operate them together in such a way that we get a benefit from the integration, the hybridization of these systems.
And what we’re looking at with this particular images is actually marine energy, and I think, you know, it’s something like a very high percentage of people in the US live very close to coastal areas. And so it helps with that accessibility and paying attention to the geographical resource opportunities that we have. I want to hit on sustainability. And, Eric, I saw that you had hit, you had manufacturing and supply chain in a few of your slides, and connecting them with Energy Storage Grand Challenge and the Long Duration Energy Storage Earthshot. It’s something that’s, you know, really important to help set the stage and priorities for research activities. What we see in this image is looking at resell. And this is where we’re looking at second life or recyclability, and understanding the
supply chain modeling for lithium ion batteries in particular. So I didn’t mention at the start, but NREL has three critical objectives that we are fitting into as a research center. And it includes advancements, technology, and increased scientific understanding of integrated energy pathways, electrons to molecules in the circular economy. Understanding the recyclability. Understanding the impact of the new energy technologies that we are looking at has to be part of a successful set of energy systems that are going to support the decarbonized grid for instance. I mentioned that we can’t hit on the, you know, trying to accelerate technologies into the marketplace without thinking about demonstration and deployment. As a national lab and at NREL,
one of the ways that we’re doing that is through ARIES, the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems, where we’re looking to have a safe environment that is coming from the perspective of the whole system, and looking to prove things out. We want to avoid adding risk into our communities, into our marketplace, into providers and end users when are we know that there will be some vulnerabilities. Let’s use a research platform partnering with national labs and other industry so that we can push and de-risk, optimize, and help drive towards secure controls of future energy systems that will help us accelerate – or excuse me, help us get these to the marketplace sooner than what we would do if we weren’t thinking about how energy storage, how energy conversion technologies fit into a whole system, and without the ability to demonstrate and prove out some of the operations.
We’re really pushing towards understanding some challenges here with this platform around physical size of energy technologies, especially the variability in the wide range of energy systems that we’re gonna look at from small-scale distributed to the bulk. We’re also looking at the secure control of large numbers, millions to tens of millions of devices, of interconnected devices, and how rapidly that’s changing. And then certainly integrating multiple diverse technologies, how we can pull in multiple energy storage technologies to help support overarching goals. I wanted to wrap up with the market readiness and impact that is driving us. And we think that the partnership and commercialization, Maggie, you had touched on this too, is important to do that. And that’s part of why I’m most excited for this seminar
talks after me, today and tomorrow, to see what people are thinking about. How can we really come together and accelerate and push forward so that we can hit these big ambitious decarbonization goals, and make sure that that system and the technologies, and what we’re looking at really can be able to handle the diverse needs, whether it be from my community and also a just perspective for these technologies. So we’re thinking about things like how do we partner? Who are the right partners? How can we help support? Because we’re just a piece of this whole picture, and we’re really looking forward to pushing and understanding how to do our role in that grand scheme a little bit better. And so I had the great advantage of representing a large number of research folks in just a quick hit on our research capabilities today. And so I’m thankful and grateful to our staff at NREL
and our partnerships across National Labs, DOE, and with partners. And with that, I’ll wrap up and just say thank you for being here, and I’m excited to see where this conversation goes. Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: Thank you, Jen, for providing that overview and hitting all the high marks of what’s needed for the conversation with energy storage, and also the capabilities that NREL has. Just we are almost halfway, I just wondered before going to next speaker, I’ll ask out to the audience and also other speakers to start thinking about questions for each speaker, and also in general subject of integration of energy storage technologies and all of the challenges ahead of us for decarbonization of the grid and transportation. So if you just put your questions on the way, and we can collect them.
And then we can, at the end of the speaker’s discussion, we’re gonna have a panel discussion from at 11:00 Mountain Time, and go from there. So thank you, Jen. So now I think next speaker is Erin Minear. And she is a senior project manager project of Electric Power & Research Institute, and she’s gonna probably provide a perspective of utilities on energy storage. It’s just kind of an important area that’s coming up. And so Erin is a registered professional engineer in the state of California, and has a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Cal Poly. Erin, if you’d like
to start uploading your presentation, and would be happy to hear from you. That would be great. Erin Minear, Electric Power & Research Institute: Thanks. Let me upload the presentation. Is that in giant presentation mode now? Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: Not yet. Erin Minear: Not yet? Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: And you’re on second slide.
[Side conversation about setting up slide] Erin Minear: All right. How does that look? Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: Good. Great. Erin Minear: Good. Great. Yeah. Thanks for inviting me to speak. I’m with the Electric Power Research Institute, EPRI. And today I want to focus the discussion on the Energy Storage Integration Council, which is one portion of EPRI’s program. And what we’re trying to do with the Energy Storage Integration Council is to facilitate an open discussion between all the different stakeholders. You know, EPRI has a strong utility perspective given our membership
and our annual research portfolio. But the utility members thought it was really important to bring together all the different stakeholders to talk about the issues. And to this discussion will be a little bit different. It’ll be focused on more near-term
challenges, and how we can collaboratively work together to address those. So we do that collaboration through coming together and creating publicly-available tools and guides. ESIC has been around since 2013, and is able to evolve and adapt with the changing needs of the industry. So here is a snapshot of some of the stakeholders. I mentioned utilities, which EPRI has that strong perspective, but really important to engage all the different stakeholders so that we can align a lot of, you know, what you’ll hear about ESIC is that we want to align common approaches, terminology in order to reduce soft cost and help to advance storage deployment. So really bringing together all the different parties. And it’s actually
evolved over time. As the needs and challenges have changed, we’ve brought in new stakeholders, new subject matter expert, which I’ll share through some examples of the work we’ve done. And so our collaborative process, really coming together, identifying the gaps, and again, more focused on near-term. So what are the challenges? We meet in strategy meetings twice a year and just say, you know, what top of mind? What are people trying to work through? And a lot of time but we hear is that different stakeholders are going through the same challenge but they’re coming at it in different ways. And so we can align on, we can come together and look at tools or
guides that we can create to help to close those gaps, and make sure we can move forward on those. And so, you know, what are the gaps? What can we do to help address them together? And then creating those through on taskforce where we get the subject matter experts together. We discuss what the issues, what the industry best practices are. And then we take those and put them through a review process with the broader group after the subject matter experts have put together some work. And EPRI will manage that editorial process of – and this is a process that’s ongoing. And so all of our resources are living documents. And the goal is to put something out there to have the industry use it as much as possible, provide that feedback back in, and then update it. And it’s ongoing conversation and a documentation of how the industry is evolving, and improving on the way we execute projects.
We have three main focus areas or working groups. The first one is focused on grid services and analysis. How do we quantify energy storage value, costs, and impacts? Can we create tools? So EPRI has an open source tool called DER-VET, and facilitating the discussions. So understanding what it means for modeling of energy storage, how can we incorporate that in a way that can be used as a communication tool to talk about storage evaluation. The second group is focused on testing and characterization, so understanding how to measure energy storage, express its performance, test it in a consistent way, especially when you have a broad range of technologies, and even within manufacturers, and how systems are integrated arranged. Can you test it in a consistent manner so that when you’re looking at different test results, you have a good understanding of how to compare them against each other.
The third area is focused on a grid integration, safely and reliably deploying storage. And this encompasses a lot of topics. In addition to safety and reliability, cyber security controls. Commissioning. So there’s lot of stuff that goes into, you know, once it’s been in the field, how do we get it up and running and operating safely? And so going into an example to show how ESIC can adapt and focus on that the current needs at the time. This example is a little bit dated, but really still drive home the message of why we need to continuously have these discussions as a group, and be adaptable and look at focusing and changing our – as the industry evolves, making sure that we can keep up with it.
So this is some surveying work done in our strategy meeting. And all these are related to safety. And it looks at what is the industry doing? What should ESIC be doing? Is this a gap? If it’s a gap, is being addressed by others, or is it something that ESIC should focus on? So as you can see, like these are all related to safety. In 2018, there was a lot of codes and standards
developed. So I think that the consensus was like we’ve got a good handle. We’re are catching up. We just need to track that the codes and standards and make sure they’re implemented, and that will help ensure the safety of the system, and then you saw shift and perspective. So in April 2019, there was the incident in Arizona and several fires have been reported in Korea that were battery-related. And so it immediately became a priority. And so ESIC being focused on more near term collaboration was able to ship and create
some tools to support that safety discussion. And then 2020, still a big focus on safety, but you know, some different stakeholders had different thoughts on whether or not it should be prioritized. And it’s good to get a sense of, you know, if things are being covered by other efforts, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. What we want to do is leverage them, point the industry to the correct resources that they can leverage. So continuing to evolve over time, and safety remains a priority.
So now we’re in 2022. In the first month, there have been two safety energy storage incidents. There was a couple more if you count one that was a system in transport, and then one at a recycling facility. And so it it’s still an issue, and we need to look at that and still come together. And the safety topic was one where we brought in – able to bring in new stakeholders. And so bringing in first responders, that fire perspective, fire department perspective, and gain those, and then open up the discussion. And so there’s still challenges around codes and standards
adoption, information about safety, benchmarking, but really what we’re trying to do is facilitate that conversation, identify the high priority needs, and then work towards addressing them. So what we did in – so this graphic kind of illustrates the need for bringing in all the different stakeholders, and why safety as an example is important, you know, across its full lifecycle, but also, you know, thinking about from the design of the technology up to the integrated system level. And you know, thinking about battery energy storage in particular, we can say, you might hear some people say, “Well, this technology is safer than this because of x, y, and z,” but that’s maybe not underlying technology. And so when you go up to the integrated system level, you need to add layers of protection across that you. For example, with LFP, some say it’s a safer ethnology than NFC for lithium ion battery technology. But we’ve seen many fires and explosions of LFP,
and it has to do with the fact that it needs to be integrated at the system level, and you need all these protections in place. And, you know, also across the whole lifecycle. So just these examples this year with, you know, a system in transportation, and then some operational, and then some at a recycling facility. We need to look at the full spectrum, and therefore, again, you know, being aware of all the different needs and the different stakeholder perspectives across the life, and different scales of energy storage.
So an example of how we can come together, and really, you know, emphasizing that we’re trying to have a discussion – or trying to create tools that improve the discussion and make it clear and transparent about what we’re trying to do. And so one thing we did was put together a reference hazard mitigation analysis to facilitate that discussion instead of just saying my technology is safer because of x, y, or z. Really talking about it within the context of what different threats there are that could result in that particular hazard, and what’s the consequence of what that hazardous is, and strategies that would prevent and mitigate those as the incidents were happening. So really laying it out and saying
how different features would address different issues, and providing a holistic solution. And, you know, this is another, also an example of that iterative process where we look at, we published something in 2019. EPRI worked with their members and did And so EPRI has a battery safety roadmap, and that’s just one topic. So we need to continue the discussion
and look at ways that we can collaborate. So this is just a snapshot, and I’ll leave it here as a leave behind so that you can see the different efforts that we’re working on within EPRI. And then another example would be, you know, performance and reliability, and this is really important for utilities to be able to invest in storage. And the track record for commercial assets is short, and we need to be able to verify this, and independently verify this. And especially you know we’re focused on near-term issues, but with all these emerging technologies, and really being able to characterize these systems and get the data on them in order to make assessment, so that we’re ready to make the investments in the technologies and features, there’s a confidence in how the systems will perform, how they can be operated to reliably support the grid.
And understanding all the different aspects of that in order to minimize the risk of the project. And again, looking at, you know, this is a specific example of data, but really it requires thinking at all different levels and getting all the different stakeholders integrated into the discussion. So you may have, you know, manufacturers where you want to get certain data, or manufacturers where you need to understand certain characteristics of the technology. Integrators,
where you need to make sure you have all the different data streams so that you can test them, and you have the operators who need to understand how to operate the system, interpret the data in order to make informed decisions on the way they manage the system. And so there’s a lot of different stakeholders coming together, and you layer on different policies on, you know, reporting and aggregation, things of that sort. And so it’s a dynamic field, but really trying to clarify that and communicate that between all the different parties. And again, just some examples of tools to help that support performance or liability analysis including data guidelines, test manuals, and when tracking.
So those are just a few highlights, you know, examples that that really drive home the need for collaboration, and what we need for, you know, coming in from the utility perspective, it’s really important that we align with all the different, the parties so that the systems are safe, and reliable, and affordable, and environmentally-responsible. So here’s another leave behind of all the other different resources that we put together and contact information. We really encourage you to – I jumped at this opportunity to talk about the Energy Storage Integration Council because we also want to bring in new stakeholders, new perspectives, and know what the issues of the industry are. And so hopefully we’ll get some additional participation there. And
that’s what I have for today. Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: Thank you, Erin. I appreciate that presentation that we’re providing perspectives from utilities. We have one question for you, I think, that came up regarding that the fires with the lithium batteries. And the questions is: “Has it caused utilities at your organizations and others to move away from lithium batteries, and to some other kind of potentially safer technologies, like flow batteries or some other storage?” Whatever. Of course cost is a big issue. But if you can speak to that, that’d be great. whether or not of course cost is big issue but if you can speak to that that would be great.
Erin Minear: Yeah, I think there is a need for a better understanding of the utility, of lithium ion technology. And so we have a large collaborative project with many utilities, and we bring in the experts to really understand that, so understanding the risk associated with that. But at the same time, it is true that looking at other technology alternatives is important, especially when you think about there might be different settings or location if you’re in a rural area versus in a highly-densely populated area, you might think about your approach to technology different. So we also have an emerging technology project that looks at all
those different alternatives, but at the same time, that project will also look at the different safety aspects of those. So there may be less fire risk with those, but other things that need to be evaluated. So I think that utilities are looking at risk from the different perspectives of safety. Dr. Ahmad Pesaran: Thank you very much, Erin. I appreciate that. So Rebecca, if we can go to our next speaker, Esther Chitsinde. She’s a project manager with Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. So it kind of brings the perspective of end user basically. She leads the Dallas Fort
Worth Digital Twin and Morpheus Building Energy Optimization Partnership with NREL and DOE. And she has a BS and MS in environmental science from Texas Christian University. Esther, you can go ahead with the slides up, that would be great. Esther Chitsinde, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport: Good morning, everyone. So I don’t have slides today, but I’m just going to have more of a conversation with you, walk you through our journey at DFW International Airport and what we see as the opportunities around behind the meter storage and what we need to make that successful, and how behind the meter storage aligns with DFW’s vision and needs for the near future. So I’ll start with the background of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. As Ahmad said, my name
2022-02-21