Solar + storage's growth spurt

 From Canary Media

Co-located renewable energy projects attracted a record $25 billion of investment in the first half of 2026, according to new global data from BloombergNEF. While that category includes any combination of solar, wind, and storage, it’s dominated by solar-plus-storage.

The $25 billion is nearly double the previous record, set in the second half of 2025 — a jump that reflects the rapidly growing interest in batteries.

Solar’s biggest weakness is its up-and-down power generation. Solar farms produce no power at night (duh) and a ton of energy on sunny afternoons — fluctuations that often don’t align with demand. Adding storage to the mix helps solve that problem, allowing a project to act more like a traditional on-demand power plant that ramps up or down depending on power prices and the grid’s energy needs.

BNEF notes that the U.S. is one of the leading countries when it comes to investment in co-located solar-plus-storage. That makes sense: The grid battery sector is thriving in the U.S., just notching its best quarter ever for installations as the cost of battery cells falls and developers get more comfortable with the tech. Nearly half the storage capacity added last quarter was built alongside solar farms.

Although global spending on co-located projects jumped, the sector accounts for a relatively small chunk of overall renewable energy investment — a topline figure that stayed stagnant between the first half of this year and the second half of 2025. Investment in offshore wind, in particular, plummeted over that time period, with BNEF noting that factors like poor auction results in Denmark and Germany cut into the number of projects able to close financing in recent months.

Still, BNEF concludes that ​“the numbers show that the broader growth story for renewables remains intact.” But in order to bring down planet-baking pollution even as demand for energy spikes, the world will need overall clean-energy investment — not just that for co-located projects — to grow fast. 

Home batteries go mainstream

From RenewEconomy

A new report released on the first anniversary of the launch of Australia’s Cheaper Home Batteries scheme has confirmed that 2025 was a record smashing year for small-scale storage, with 221,000 residential battery systems installed over the calendar year, adding nearly 5 gigawatt-hours of storage.

This number has since more than doubled – recent updates have put the total number of home battery systems installed through the federal rebate at more than 450,000, and counting, as the scheme ticks over into its second year.

But the Australian Battery Marker Report, published on Wednesday by SunWiz, documents a year where home batteries hit the mainstream and fundamentally changed the course of the consumer energy revolution.

In total, SunWiz says 221,000 systems were installed in 2025, compared with 72,500 the previous year, delivering an additional 4,790 megawatt-hours (MWh) of new storage capacity to the grid.

This, says the report, is equivalent to powering around 1.2 million homes over the four-hour evening peak period, or around 25 times the capacity of the Hornsdale Power Reserve – the world’s first ever big battery, installed in South Australia nearly a decade ago.

Most of the record new home battery capacity, of course, was installed in the second half of year, following the July 2025 launch of federal Labor’s Cheaper Home Battery rebate, the success of which has exceeded all expectations and led to the scheme being adjusted to make it last longer and go further.

“[This] wasn’t just a growth year for Australian batteries – it was a market transformation,” the report says. “We’re talking a threefold increase in system count and a fivefold increase in capacity versus 2024.  2025 … was the year [home batteries] went mainstream,” adds SunWiz founder and managing director, Warwick Johnston.

All told, nearly 5 per cent (4.6%) of Australian homes had a battery installed by the end of the year, and 13 per cent of all of the nation’s rooftop solar systems had added a battery.

2025 was also the year that Australian households fundamentally changed how they ‘do’ battery storage; system sizes nearly doubled, the battery-to-solar attachment rate soared, and people also started boosting the amount of rooftop solar they have, to fill their super-sized batteries.

Over the course of 2025, the average battery size jumped to 21.6 kilowatt-hours (kWh) compared with 11.8 kWh the year before, the report says.

It’s telling that while installations have increased threefold, capacity has increased fivefold,” says Johnston.

“Australian homes are benefiting from more modern and larger battery systems that are supporting the country’s emissions goals and their own back pockets at a time when energy costs have become such a major national concern.”

2025 was also the year that households were given a whole lot more choice on battery brands and offerings. The report names China-based Sigenergy as market leader by the end of the year, having only entered the local market in 2024. Fox ESS also re-entered the Australian market and by year’s end had captured 10 per cent of market share per kWh, while Tesla and BYD continued to slide.

Looking ahead, SunWiz forecasts continued momentum, and is predicting that a new record of 350,000 home batteries will be added in 2026 across the country.

“We’re looking at years of higher energy costs and uncertainty over those costs,” says Johnston. “That motivates Australian families to secure their own electricity supply.

“We anticipate installation volumes to 2030 will be shaped by the interplay of declining rebates, falling battery costs, rising electricity prices, and rising demand for energy self-sufficiently. On balance, these forces point to sustained demand. The boom is far from over.”

When this program was first announced by the government, critics said that it would only benefit the wealthy.  However, the huge jump in storage meant that gas set the price much less often, which cause a fall in the wholesale price of electricity, which led to benefits for the whole market.

The 100-hour battery is real

Intra-day storage — soaking up solar at the middle of the day to be released in the evening and overnight — is perfectly feasible using lithium-ion or sodium-ion batteries, which are getting cheaper and cheaper.  But what happens when there are prolonged spells where there is little solar, no wind, and high demand because it's cold, what the Germans have dubbed dunkelflaute (doonkel-flowta)?  For that we need long-duration storage, which I've talked about before.

One of the options for long-duration storage is the iron-air battery.  And it's now in commercial production in the US.  The video below from Just Have A Think discusses it.

Hybrid wind-battery systems better than coal

Loy Yang A power station
Source: AGL

 From RenewEconomy

Hybrid wind and battery projects could cover off almost all of the energy generation and grid services currently provided by Australia’s remaining coal plants, but without the breakdowns or the pollution, and with a bunch of added extras coal plants can’t do.

Daniel Ryan, who is technical lead of future grid at Envision Energy, says the China-based company can “clearly see the value” of hybrid renewables power stations in Australia, where wind and battery energy storage could be integrated behind a single grid connection point.

While grid-coupled solar-battery hybrid projects are all the rage in Australia’s renewables development pipeline at the moment – highly prized for their numerous economic and technological advantages – the wind sector is playing catch-up on this trend.

Ryan says that while Australia has many “renewable power parks” and has also built have some of the world’s largest onshore wind farms, most of the operational wind and battery projects are what he describes as “un-orchestrated;” separate control systems, and “very simplistic.”

Given the lack of operating examples in Australia, Envision has built its own large-scale “living laboratory” in Chi Feng in China, to get a better understanding of what true, AC-coupled wind and battery energy storage systems (BESS) can offer a modern-day grid.

“This is not a pilot or a small demonstration,” Ryan told the 2026 Wind Industry Forum in Melbourne on Tuesday. 

“It’s a self-developed, fully integrated renewable generation system, combining gigawatts of renewables, grid-forming storage, power electronic loads, and high voltage infrastructure.

“Bringing these elements together, we can clearly see the value of coordinated hybrid systems in Australia,” Ryan said.

“By integrating wind and BESS behind a single connection point, we move from a collection of assets to a fully orchestrated power plant.” 

But with an eye to the Australian market, Envision has taken its R&D efforts a step further than the living lab in China to a “thought experiment” based on one of Australia’s largest remaining coal plants.

“To get a better understanding of what a future wind-BESS hybrid generator needs to deliver, we thought that it’s useful to look at what we’re trying to replace,” Ryan told the conference. 

“As we’re based in Victoria, we did a thought experiment on Loy Yang Power Station,” he said, referring to the until recently Alinta Energy-owned Loy Yang B plant in the Latrobe Valley that is likely to one of the last to close, with a 2046 date pencilled in.

“(Loy Yang) delivers a wide range of system services, including around 1.2 gigawatts [GW] of reactive power capability, 10 GVA [giga-volt amperes] of bulk current contribution … and frequency control services; 200-400 megawatts [MW] of contingency and regulation FCAS  [Frequency Control Ancillary Services]. 

“So, the key question becomes, can a wind-BESS hybrid not only replace the energy output but also exceed the system performance of a coal power station?

To replace Loy Yang with a wind-BESS hybrid, Envision landed on a 3.35 GW wind farm paired with a 1 GW grid-forming BESS, which Ryan says reflects the size and scale of projects that are beginning to emerge in markets like Australia. 

“Starting with system services, it’s immediately clear that a wind-BESS hybrid doesn’t just match coal in many areas, it actually exceeds it,” he told the conference. 

Ryan says that on regulation and contingency FCAS [frequency control ancillary services] the BESS would provide two- to six-times as much as Loy Yang – and could also participate heavily in the one-second FCAS market.

The hybrid power station also offers the primary frequency response contribution of the wind farm, Ryan adds, which is “slower, but still very significant due to a scale.” 

“We can conclude, I think, from this that the frequency performance of this power station far exceeds any coal power station,” he told the conference.

“For reactive power capability, the plant gives us around 1300 megavar , which is slightly more than Loy Yang, and should be definitely sufficient for any voltage regulation purposes in the network. 

“And finally, in terms of fault level, this falls a little bit short, of course, of the coal power station,” Ryan says.  

“However, we note that because we have a grid forming desk and a wind farm behind a single connection point, it should still be quite significant at a system level, and I think, as technology provider, we’d argue … that maybe fault level isn’t the best defining characteristic for system strength.

“So, what are the key takeaways with hybrid renewable power plant? You don’t just get around the same performance as a coal power station, but you actually get a lot of other benefits,” Ryan told the conference. 

“You can operate at low SER [specific energy rating], you can perform black start and islanding, and you can operate without power generation. 

“All of these a coal power station usually can’t do.”

For wind industry veteran and Envision Energy’s head of wind in Australia, Peter Cowling, the increasingly urgent need to replace coal with cleaner and smarter hybrid renewables technology is one [of] the “super attractive” fundamentals of the Australian market.

“We have a coal sector that literally must retire at some point, particularly Victoria, given the age of [its] facilities and their emissions intensity,” he told the same conference on Tuesday. 

“The resource is phenomenal, still, by any global standard, and the transition is actually incredibly advanced. There is – despite the difficulties of closing new generation programs – … still extraordinary momentum.

“We’ve obviously got a bunch of transmission and planning issues to resolve, and ultimately cost issues to resolve, to get more electrons being generated … but the projects are there. 

“There’s 60-odd gigawatts of projects. We’ve just got to push those through, and I think we will fairly quickly find ourselves with the opposite problem, which is a crazy boom in two years’ time, where we can’t find enough people and cranes. 

“So …we really do believe the market is going to take off,” Cowling said.

This power station is about 5 k's from where I live.  In this part of the world, though the wind isn't necessarily strong, it's nevertheless still a good location for wind farms, and an even better one for offshore wind farms.  (Mean onshore wind speed is 12.5 kph in the morning and 19.3 kph in the afternoon, and minimum wind speed needed for turbines is 11 kph) And of course, because of the coal power stations, the HVDC [high-voltage direct current] power lines are already installed.  

I hadn't thought that wind needed short-term storage, but I was wrong.  Combining wind with batteries will improve grid stability and reliability.

Total solar installed doubles in 2 years

 From Kees van der Leun

After decades of solar PV deployment, the world crossed the 1 TW (a million MW) line in 2022. Just two years later, after adding 0.6 TW in 2024, we already crossed the 2 TW mark too!
#SolarPV #solarenergy #renewables

It took 22 years for cumulative solar installed to reach 1 terawatt.  It took just 2 years for the next terawatt.  And I expect over the next 2 years, another 2 terawatts of solar will be installed.  Total cumulated solar is doubling every two years.  

Why?  First, solar continues to plunge in price.  Second, how much solar you could have in your grid was limited because there's no solar at night.  But with storage costs plunging, that's less and less of a constraint.  Solar farms are already routinely built with 4 hours of co-located storage.  In a couple of years, that will be 8 hours.  

Note:  this is not new solar installed each year, though that is also growing exponentially.  It is the cumulative total of all solar panels installed.

Electricity generation is going to transition to zero carbon much faster than even I, an optimist, have been thinking.

EV prices will keep on falling

 Battery costs continue to fall.  If anything, the rate of decline is accelerating.   

This has huge implications for EVs, obviously.  EVs will very soon have the same "sticker price" as petrol cars (they are already much cheaper to run).  EVs will rapidly rise to 100% of car sales.

But it also is crucial for de-carbonising electricity generation.   

Let's take a simple example.  Within the tropics (between 23 degrees north and south of the equator), we could run the grid entirely on solar.  For example, at Brisbane (latitude 27 S), in mid-winter (June), there are 10 hours and 25 minutes of daylight.  With tracking solar, which faces due east in the morning and due west in the afternoon, the output profile is "square", i.e., rises almost immediately to the maximum and stays there, compared with, say, rooftop solar, where the output rises in a sine wave to its maximum over a couple of hours over midday.  Demand at night is 2/3rds of demand during the day, so we would need something like 8 hours of storage.  If battery costs have halved, that means that 8 hours of storage will now cost what 4 hours used to.  

Outside the tropics, combining wind and solar and 8 hours of storage will be able to replace fossil fuels.  Only in high latitudes (north of 60 degrees), with long winter nights and high demand for heating, will we require seasonal storage (hydro or power-to-gas).  

Remember also, that EVs are storage on wheels, with the average EV having 70 kWh, or 3 plus days (72 hours plus) of average household demand (20 kWh per day).  This will be combined with several hours' worth of storage at every utility-scale solar farm, plus additional storage at substations to stabilise the grid.  

This video from the Electric Viking discusses the plunging costs of battery storage and its implications.

Batteries + solar = grid stability

Note exponential curve.
Also, excludes household storage

From This is Not Cool (formerly ClimateCrocks)

Denton Record Chronicle (Texas):

With temperatures climbing over 100 [F; 38 C]  in much of the state, the Texas electric grid set an all-time record for energy demand Tuesday.

Despite the heat wave, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has yet to ask people to conserve electricity. That’s a big change from 2023, when extreme weather and fear of low power reserves prompted ERCOT to issue 11 requests for conservation through the year.

Grid operators and energy experts are pointing to the rapid growth of solar power and grid-scale batteries as key reasons why residents haven’t been asked to conserve this month.

“We’ve seen significant additions of energy storage resources, solar resources and wind resources, with a few additions also on the gas side,” Pablo Vegas, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said at an ERCOT board meeting Tuesday. “All of that has helped to contribute to less scarcity conditions.”

In fact, the growth of some of those energy sources has been downright record-breaking.

As the sun and heat bore down, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday brought the top three days for solar power production in the history of the state grid, according to the website Gridstatus.io, which tracks the performance of regional electricity transmission systems.

On Sunday, the top day for solar production, Texas solar farms produced 20,832 megawatts of power. It’s worth noting that this number does not include energy produced by rooftop panels on homes and businesses.

According to ERCOT, 1 megawatt is enough to power about 250 homes at times of peak demand.

Texas also set new records Monday and Tuesday for the amount of power provided by big utility-scale batteries, something that could have made the difference between a normal day and a grid emergency.

“The previous storage record was shattered by 25%,” Doug Lewin, author of The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, tweeted. We “almost certainly would have been rolling outages without it.”

The reason for the rapid uptick in solar and battery power on the state grid is pretty simple.

Energy demand has grown rapidly in Texas over the last few years, and frequent moments of energy scarcity have presented a business opportunity for solar farms and battery storage facilities that can quickly set up shop to fill the need.

Hot, sunny days — the very conditions that bring higher energy use — are also the conditions that produce solar power. That solar energy also can be used to fill large batteries that discharge power back to the grid when the sun sets over solar farms, but air conditioners are still running full blast.

San Jose Mercury News:

 

Four years ago this week, California’s power grid was so strained by a heat wave that rolling blackouts hit hundreds of thousands of residents over two days. It nearly happened again two years ago, when state officials issued 11 “flex alerts” asking businesses and homeowners to voluntarily reduce electricity use to avoid power disruptions.

But this year when a record heat wave scorched the state over three weeks from mid-June to July — sending temperatures across the Bay Area and the Central Valley soaring over 110 degrees — there was plenty of power. No warnings. No shortages. No flex alerts.

A big part of the reason, experts say, is a boom in the construction of giant battery projects.

California’s high-tech battery centers built with thousands of lithium-ion batteries similar to the batteries in cell phones and electric cars are solving the main shortcoming of the push for more renewable energy: the fact that the sun doesn’t shine at night.

Battery storage has increased sevenfold in the past five years in California, from 1,474 megawatts in 2020 to 10,383 megawatts now. A megawatt is enough electricity to run 750 homes.

Before, when the sun went down every summer evening, giant solar farms stopped producing electricity, sometimes leading to power shortages statewide in the early evening. Now, the growing number of battery storage plants across the state can store that solar power during the day when it is plentiful. The battery storage plants then release it back to the power grid in the evening as the sun goes down but hot weather keeps electricity demand high because millions of Californians are running air conditioners.

“Think of it like an energy bank account,” said Elliott Mainzer, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator, an agency in Folsom that manages the state’s power grid. “In the middle of the day, you are making big deposits. At the end of the day, we withdraw from that account.”

Aluminium, salt water and coffee produces ..... hydrogen?????

From Science Daily

MIT engineers have found that when the aluminum in soda cans is exposed in its pure form and mixed with seawater, the solution bubbles up and naturally produces hydrogen -- a gas that can be subsequently used to power an engine or fuel cell without generating carbon emissions. What's more, this simple reaction can be sped up by adding a common stimulant: caffeine.

In a study appearing today in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, the researchers show they can produce hydrogen gas by dropping pretreated, pebble-sized aluminum pellets into a beaker of filtered seawater. The aluminum is pretreated with a rare-metal alloy that effectively scrubs aluminum into a pure form that can react with seawater to generate hydrogen. The salt ions in the seawater can in turn attract and recover the alloy, which can be reused to generate more hydrogen, in a sustainable cycle.

The team found that this reaction between aluminum and seawater successfully produces hydrogen gas, though slowly. On a lark, they tossed into the mix some coffee grounds and found, to their surprise, that the reaction picked up its pace.

In the end, the team discovered that a low concentration of imidazole -- an active ingredient in caffeine -- is enough to significantly speed up the reaction, producing the same amount of hydrogen in just five minutes, compared to two hours without the added stimulant.

The researchers are developing a small reactor that could run on a marine vessel or underwater vehicle. The vessel would hold a supply of aluminum pellets (recycled from old soda cans and other aluminum products), along with a small amount of gallium-indium and caffeine. These ingredients could be periodically funneled into the reactor, along with some of the surrounding seawater, to produce hydrogen on demand. The hydrogen could then fuel an onboard engine to drive a motor or generate electricity to power the ship.

"This is very interesting for maritime applications like boats or underwater vehicles because you wouldn't have to carry around seawater -- it's readily available," says study lead author Aly Kombargi, a PhD student in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering. "We also don't have to carry a tank of hydrogen. Instead, we would transport aluminum as the 'fuel,' and just add water to produce the hydrogen that we need."

The study's co-authors include Enoch Ellis, an undergraduate in chemical engineering; Peter Godart PhD '21, who has founded a company to recycle aluminum as a source of hydrogen fuel; and Douglas Hart, MIT professor of mechanical engineering.

The MIT team, led by Hart, is developing efficient and sustainable methods to produce hydrogen gas, which is seen as a "green" energy source that could power engines and fuel cells without generating climate-warming emissions.

One drawback to fueling vehicles with hydrogen is that some designs would require the gas to be carried onboard like traditional gasoline in a tank -- a risky setup, given hydrogen's volatile potential. Hart and his team have instead looked for ways to power vehicles with hydrogen without having to constantly transport the gas itself.

They found a possible workaround in aluminum -- a naturally abundant and stable material that, when in contact with water, undergoes a straightforward chemical reaction that generates hydrogen and heat.

The reaction, however, comes with a sort of Catch-22: While aluminum can generate hydrogen when it mixes with water, it can only do so in a pure, exposed state. The instant aluminum meets with oxygen, such as in air, the surface immediately forms a thin, shield-like layer of oxide that prevents further reactions. This barrier is the reason hydrogen doesn't immediately bubble up when you drop a soda can in water.

In previous work, using fresh water, the team found they could pierce aluminum's shield and keep the reaction with water going by pretreating the aluminum with a small amount of rare metal alloy made from a specific concentration of gallium and indium. The alloy serves as an "activator," scrubbing away any oxide buildup and creating a pure aluminum surface that is free to react with water. When they ran the reaction in fresh, de-ionized water, they found that one pretreated pellet of aluminum produced 400 milliliters of hydrogen in just five minutes. They estimate that just 1 gram of pellets would generate 1.3 liters of hydrogen in the same amount of time.

But to further scale up the system would require a significant supply of gallium indium, which is relatively expensive and rare.

"For this idea to be cost-effective and sustainable, we had to work on recovering this alloy postreaction," Kombargi says.

In the team's new work, they found they could retrieve and reuse gallium indium using a solution of ions. The ions -- atoms or molecules with an electrical charge -- protect the metal alloy from reacting with water and help it to precipitate into a form that can be scooped out and reused.

"Lucky for us, seawater is an ionic solution that is very cheap and available," says Kombargi, who tested the idea with seawater from a nearby beach. "I literally went to Revere Beach with a friend and we grabbed our bottles and filled them, and then I just filtered out algae and sand, added aluminum to it, and it worked with the same consistent results."

He found that hydrogen indeed bubbled up when he added aluminum to a beaker of filtered seawater. And he was able to scoop out the gallium indium afterward. But the reaction happened much more slowly than it did in fresh water. It turns out that the ions in seawater act to shield gallium indium, such that it can coalesce and be recovered after the reaction. But the ions have a similar effect on aluminum, building up a barrier that slows its reaction with water.

As they looked for ways to speed up the reaction in seawater, the researchers tried out various and unconventional ingredients.

"We were just playing around with things in the kitchen, and found that when we added coffee grounds into seawater and dropped aluminum pellets in, the reaction was quite fast compared to just seawater," Kombargi says.

To see what might explain the speedup, the team reached out to colleagues in MIT's chemistry department, who suggested they try imidazole -- an active ingredient in caffeine, which happens to have a molecular structure that can pierce through aluminum (allowing the material to continue reacting with water), while leaving gallium indium's ionic shield intact.

"That was our big win," Kombargi says. "We had everything we wanted: recovering the gallium indium, plus the fast and efficient reaction."

The researchers believe they have the essential ingredients to run a sustainable hydrogen reactor. They plan to test it first in marine and underwater vehicles. They've calculated that such a reactor, holding about 40 pounds of aluminum pellets, could power a small underwater glider for about 30 days by pumping in surrounding seawater and generating hydrogen to power a motor.

"We're showing a new way to produce hydrogen fuel, without carrying hydrogen but carrying aluminum as the 'fuel,'" Kombargi says. "The next part is to figure out how to use this for trucks, trains, and maybe airplanes. Perhaps, instead of having to carry water as well, we could extract water from the ambient humidity to produce hydrogen. That's down the line."

All very nice.  But the key question is this:  how much energy does it take to make the aluminium pebbles compared to what is released when the hydrogen in burned or used in a fuel cell?  In other words, what is its "round-trip efficiency"?  Producing hydrogen via electrolysis has a round-trip efficiency of 40%.  Lithium-ion batteries have a round-trip efficiency of 90% or higher.  Using old coke cans (where the aluminium has already been made) may mean it's better than 40%, in which case it's a goer.  

The article doesn't say what happens to the oxygen presumably produced as part of this price.  I'm presuming it combines with the aluminium?  If not, hydrogen and oxygen is a very explosive mix.

Battery pack prices hit record low

From BNEF

Following unprecedented price increases in 2022, battery prices are falling again this year. The price of lithium-ion battery packs has dropped 14% to a record low of $139/kWh, according to analysis by research provider BloombergNEF (BNEF). This was driven by raw material and component prices falling as production capacity increased across all parts of the battery value chain, while demand growth fell short of some industry expectations.

The analysis indicates that battery demand across electric vehicles and stationary energy storage is still on track to grow at a remarkable pace of 53% year-on-year, reaching 950 gigawatt-hours in 2023. Despite this growth, major battery manufacturers reported lower utilization rates for their plants, while demand and revenue fell short of many companies’ expectations. As a result, many EV and battery makers revisited their production targets, which in turn impacted battery prices. Lithium prices reached a high point at the end of 2022, but fears that prices would remain high have largely subsided since then and prices are now falling again.

Evelina Stoikou, energy storage senior associate at BNEF and lead author of the report, said: “It is another year where battery prices closely followed raw material prices. In the many years that we’ve been doing this survey, falling prices have been driven by scale learnings and technological innovation, but that dynamic has changed. The drop in prices this year was attributed to significant growth in production capacity across the value chain in combination with weaker-than-expected demand.”

The figures represent an average across multiple battery end-uses, including different types of electric vehicles, buses and stationary storage projects. For battery electric vehicle (BEV) packs, prices were $128/kWh on a volume-weighted average basis in 2023. At the cell level, average prices for BEVs were just $89/kWh. This indicates that on average, cells account for 78% of the total pack price. Over the last four years, the cell-to-pack cost ratio has risen from the traditional 70:30 split. This is partially due to changes to pack design, such as the introduction of cell-to-pack approaches, which have helped reduce costs.

On a regional basis, average battery pack prices were lowest in China, at $126/kWh. Packs in the US and Europe were 11% and 20% higher, respectively. Higher prices reflect the relative immaturity of these markets, higher production costs, lower volumes, and the diverse range of applications. There was also intense price competition domestically in China this year as battery manufacturers ramped up production capacity aiming to grab a share of the growing battery demand.

The industry continues to switch to the low-cost cathode chemistry known as lithium iron phosphate (LFP). These packs and cells had the lowest global weighted-average prices, at $130/kWh and $95/kWh, respectively. This is the first year that BNEF’s analysis found LFP average cell prices falling below $100/kWh. On average, LFP cells were 32% cheaper than lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) cells in 2023.

Miners and metals traders surveyed expect prices for key battery metals like lithium, nickel and cobalt to ease further in 2024. Given this, BNEF expects average battery pack prices to drop again next year, reaching $133/kWh (in real 2023 dollars). Technological innovation and manufacturing improvement should drive further declines in battery pack prices in the coming years, to $113/kWh in 2025 and $80/kWh in 2030.

Average battery pack prices have been falling by ~15% per annum, compound, since 2009.  It's been said by experts, for a while, that a battery pack price of $100/kWh would make EV "sticker" prices comparable to petrol/diesel car prices.   Adjusting for inflation, that number would today be ~$120/kWh.   If BNEF's forecast battery pack prices are correct, that mean that parity will be reached in 2025---less than 2 years from now.  Which means, in turn, that the percentage of EVs in total car and light truck sales will continue to rise rapidly.  It also means that the cost of storage for the grid will fall, reducing even more the cost of switching to renewables. 

How California kept the lights on

From ClimateCrocks

The recent heatwave showed grid scale battery storage has arrived in California in a big way. In 2020, the state had a mere 250 megawatts of batteries installed on its grid, out of a total statewide peak load of 52 gigawatts (GW). During last week’s heat wave, California had more than 3.2 GW of batteries supporting the grid, more capacity than the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. These batteries typically provide four hours of energy, so that’s 150 times more energy from just two years ago. Batteries played a critical role in keeping the grid running, and without them we would have experienced rolling blackouts.

California’s grid has the most installed battery capacity installed of any grid worldwide, and the United States led global investment in grid scale battery storage with nearly half of all investment last year. By investing in energy storage, the state has increased its resilience to extreme weather.

But this is just the start – more and more batteries are coming online in California. Earlier this year, the California Public Utilities Commission issued its preferred system plan, which includes 15 GW of new storage and demand response resources to be installed by 2032. More than 90 GW of batteries are proposed in the California ISO’s interconnection queue, showing strong commercial interest in battery storage. Batteries will be a crucial resource for meeting California’s ambitious clean energy goals, ensuring sufficient firm capacity to keep the grid running even in times without solar or wind energy.

Demand response, where customers reduce their usage either voluntarily or through compensation, plays a critical role in grid reliability and is a key building block in the resource portfolio balancing supply and demand. In extreme cases like the heat wave last week, grid operators don’t always have enough generation online to meet load. In fact, most grids plan to have some small number of outages, as it is very costly to plan to meet load all the time.

Tuesday’s extraordinary text alert asking customers to reduce their electricity demand was successful in avoiding rolling blackouts – it was followed almost immediately by a roughly 2 GW drop in demand. But that sort of mechanism can only work in limited situations, and can’t be called on more than once or twice a year.

Some localized outages were caused by distribution transformers overloading due to heat, and the City of Healdsburg misunderstood the grid operator’s emergency level and started load shedding (rolling blackouts) before they were asked to, but overall the grid held up well.

The weather facing the state, and the rest of the West, was prolonged and extreme. Not only does the hot weather mean record breaking load for the grid, it also means punishing temperatures can force equipment offline. Grid planners need to acknowledge climate change is pushing historic temperatures from extreme to normal and plan for more of these extreme, West-wide, long lasting heat storms.

Solar provided a consistent 13 GW of power to California’s grid last week from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. each day, roughly a quarter of total demand. The evening hours from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. were the times of greatest grid stress, as solar output drops but demand remains high. This is when batteries helped the grid, charging during midday and discharging in the early evening. On Tuesday, heat wave’s hottest day and the day of greatest grid stress, wind picked up in the evening and provided 2.7 GW of power.

While we made it through last week with the grid intact, California shouldn’t have to suffer such close calls in the future. The state is racing to install more solar, wind, batteries, as well as transmission to connect all these new resources to the grid.

However, supply chain challenges with both solar and batteries have delayed many projects, leaving the state short of meeting its goals. In addition, the pace of transmission development has not kept up with the demand, leaving many projects stuck in the queue waiting to connect to the grid. The state needs a comprehensive plan to deploy new projects and unblock the logjam of transmission development so it can meet its clean energy goals.

New cheap battery of aluminium, sulphur and salt

 From New Atlas

The three main ingredients in the new battery, from left: aluminum, sulfur and salt

Rebecca Miller

Engineers at MIT have developed a new battery design using common materials – aluminum, sulfur and salt. Not only is the battery low-cost, but it’s resistant to fire and failures, and can be charged very fast, which could make it useful for powering a home or charging electric vehicles.

Lithium-ion batteries have dominated the field for the last few decades, thanks to their reliability and high energy density. However, lithium is becoming scarcer and more expensive, and the cells can be hazardous, exploding or bursting into flames if damaged or improperly used. Cheaper, safer alternatives are needed, especially as the world transitions towards renewable energy and electric vehicles.

So the MIT team set out to design a new type of battery out of readily available, inexpensive materials. After a search and some trial and error, they settled on aluminum for one electrode and sulfur for the other, topped off with an electrolyte of molten chloro-aluminate salt. Not only are all of these ingredients cheap and common, but they’re not flammable, so there’s no risk of fire or explosion.

In tests, the team demonstrated that the new battery cells can withstand hundreds of charge cycles, and charge very quickly – in some experiments, less than a minute. The cells would cost just one sixth of the price of a similar-sized lithium-ion cell.

They can not only operate at high temperatures of up to 200 °C (392 °F) but they actually work better when hotter – at 110 °C (230 °F), the batteries charged 25 times faster than they did at 25 °C (77 °F). Importantly, the researchers say the battery doesn’t need any external energy to reach this elevated temperature – its usual cycle of charging and discharging is enough to keep it that warm.

Although the type of salt in the electrolyte was chosen because it has a low melting point, it coincidentally has another benefit – it naturally prevents the formation of dendrites. These metal tendrils, which gradually grow between the two electrodes until they cause a short circuit, are a major hurdle for batteries, particularly lithium-ion cells.

The team says that this battery design would be best suited to the scale of a few dozen kilowatt-hours, like powering an individual home from renewable sources. They could also be useful as charging stations for electric vehicles, thanks to their rapid charging. Other types of batteries, such as a recent design using molten salt electrolyte and aluminum and nickel electrodes, could work better at grid scale.

The patents for the aluminum-sulfur batteries have been licensed to a spinoff company called Avanti, co-founded by one of the authors of the study describing the design. The first order of business is to build it at scale, and run it through stress tests.




The research was published in the journal Nature.

Source: MIT

It's dark, it's still, it's dunkelflaute

 From Energy Networks

Whether you’ve heard of it or not, dunkelflaute (dunk-el-flout-eh) is a challenge our energy systems will need to manage. Dunkelflaute is a German word that literally means dark doldrums or dark lull. It describes events where there is minimal or no sunshine and wind for extended periods, usually occurring during winter. Dunkelflaute is a specific problem of low electricity output that occurs in highly-renewable electricity systems. The challenge it presents is obvious – how to guarantee electricity supply when the dark lull descends?

In Australia, this has been referred to as a renewable drought. A recent lull in wind generation in South Australia is a small-scale snapshot of what could become a much larger problem in future.

AEMO data (via Open NEM) shows that across 11 and 12 June, wind power (represented by green in Figure 1 below) generated fewer than 4,800 MWh of a total demanded 55,000 MWh, only 8.7 per cent of total generation. This is compared with 9 and 10 June when wind power generated 46,000 MWh out of a total demanded 73,000 MWh, contributing 63 per cent to generation.

 

Germany is in a similar position as South Australia in terms of renewable penetration. Renewable electricity in Germany contributed 45.4 per cent of electricity consumption in 2020, more than coal, oil and gas combined. Germany also has significant transmission connection with the EU, possessing more interconnectors than any other country in Europe.

In Germany there is a growing fear of dunkelflaute as the share of renewable generation increases and displaces dispatchable generation. The type of event to cause dunkelflaute doesn’t have to be severe weather like we saw in Texas in February. It can be as benign as several still winter days in a row. 

How do we manage dunkelflaute?

A recent Grattan Institute report Go for net zero referenced dunkelflaute as ‘the winter problem’. In the document, Grattan notes that an energy system with 90 per cent renewable electricity would reduce emissions by 105 million tonnes at a cost of less than $20 per tonne. The final 10 per cent, however, is much trickier to achieve because the electricity system must increasingly rely on firming options.

The immediately available electricity storage option that might come to mind is batteries – but batteries tend to be best suited to managing hourly fluctuations across the day, charging from the midday sun and then discharging to help with the evening peak. Today’s batteries are not well placed to manage longer durations, with most having less than four hours of storage. The Victorian 300MW Big Battery project in Geelong is slated to be able to provide electricity to 400,000 households for one hour at full charge. That may be big but managing dunkelflaute will require a much bigger battery.

Broadly, there appear to be three options that could assist the transition from 90 to 100 per cent renewables.

Lots of renewable generation and transmission

The first is building a diverse renewable generation fleet all across the country in hopes that the wind is blowing or sun is shining somewhere, while ensuring sufficient interconnection to transport large quantities of electricity all across the country. This option would result in a large amount of electricity being ‘wasted’, along with lowering the utilisation of interconnection, while still leaving room for dunkelflaute in severe cases.

There is a positive correlation between solar energy across the National Energy Market (NEM) . When the sun is shining in one area, it is also likely to be shining in others, and visa versa. The absence of solar energy in one region may not be easily replaced by solar in another as different regions can be affected by similar weather systems.

Deep storage

The second option is building deep storage, like pumped hydro, that by its nature is well placed to provide storage capacity. Snowy 2.0 for example will be able to provide 2000 MW of generation capacity for 175 hours at full capacity. Grattan has modelled that across a 10-year period, up to 9GW of storage capacity might be required to bridge the largest gap between renewable generation and demand over 14 days. That’s about nine Snowy 2.0’s assuming they all start at full capacity.

This type of deep storage solution is likely to sit idle most of the time and could be challenging to finance, with Grattan rightly noting that many optimal sites for pumped hydro have already been developed. Additional interconnection would also be required to connect this deep storage, which may again be poorly utilised.

Developing this much deep storage is likely to be incredibly costly and unlikely to be in customer’s best interests.

Zero emissions dispatchable energy

The third and most promising option is building zero-emissions dispatchable energy, consisting of renewable gas usage in gas powered generation plants. Natural gas already provides a similar role in today’s generation mix and renewable gas will allow much of the current infrastructure to be utilised to support high levels of variable renewable electricity generation.

Frontier Economics examined the role of gas powered generation in South Australia during renewable droughts to support a highly-renewable system and found that using gas powered generation could reduce the overall system cost by between 28 to 35 per cent per year, depending on the extent of the renewable drought during winter.

Figure 3 – Indexed systems cost for 2030 and 2035 – South Australia (Source: Frontier Economics (2021), Potential for gas-powered generation to support renewables)

The optimal level of gas generation was found to be seven per cent of total generation. If natural gas can be substituted by renewable gas into the future, it’s likely that full decarbonisation can be achieved by utilising existing infrastructure and lowering overall costs.

 

Managing the winter lull

Dunkelflaute is a challenging problem that requires detailed planning and mapping of the electricity system and usage throughout the year, rather than relying on averages that are more commonly talked about.

There are a range of technical options available to manage dunkelflaute. Batteries and pumped hydro can be good options for managing hourly and daily fluctuations in demand, but there are questions over longer durations. Shorter-term storage is likely to best be complemented by renewable gas electricity generation to manage longer periods of low variable renewable generation.