An Unexpected Current That's Remaking American Politics - New forms of electricity storage

New forms of electricity storage are making the grid more renewable and more reliable—and may change the politics of climate change.

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That was baseless, too, yet at the same time it actually did refer to a serious challenge for the clean energy revolution: the “intermittency” of wind and solar electricity.

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But now another technology revolution is underway that could help solve that problem: an electricity storage boom. The cost of lithium-ion batteries has plunged 85 percent in a decade, and 30 percent in just the past year, so utilities across the U.S. have started attaching containers full of them to the grid—and they’re planning to install far more of them in the coming years.

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“This will be like the change from analog to digital, or landlines to cell phones,” says Advanced Microgrid Systems CEO Susan Kennedy, whose firm’s software helps utilities optimize their power choices every instant of every day. “The energy industry will never be the same.”

Electricity storage will reshape the grid in many ways, but the most important is its potential to accelerate the already explosive growth of renewable energy—and that will have political implications. Of the 21 states with the highest greenhouse gas emissions per capita, Trump won 20 of them, and the lone exception, New Mexico, just passed a law committing to 100 percent clean power by 2045. By contrast, Hillary Clinton won the eight states with the lowest emissions per capita. But that carbon divide is not necessarily permanent. Eighty percent of the wind power installed during Trump’s presidency has been built in states he won, and the five most wind-dependent states were all Trump states. And while the storage boom started in blue states like California and Hawaii, it is taking off in Texas, Florida, and the rest of Red America as well. Polls suggest “clean energy” is now popular throughout the country, even though “climate action” is not, and there are now more than 3 million clean energy jobs in America, versus only 50,000 coal-mining jobs. The president’s fossil-fueled rhetoric no longer reflects the reality on the ground. And the politics of energy might become less partisan in a world in which renewable power becomes much more common.

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Overall, the consultancy Wood Mackenzie expects U.S. storage additions to double in 2019, triple in 2020 and increase 13-fold over the next five years, which would store enough electricity to power more than 5 million homes. The forecasters at Bloomberg New Energy Finance expect more than $600 billion in global investment in battery storage by 2040. The storage boom, like so many green trends in America, first took hold in California, but Ravi Manghani, the head of energy storage research at Wood Mackenzie, says it is spreading much faster than anyone expected, ending the era when power had to be distributed and used the instant it was generated.

“Every time we do a new forecast, we have to revise it up for deployment and down for cost,” says Ravi Manghani, head of energy storage research at Wood Mackenzie. “We’ve been proven wrong again and again.”

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Last March, FPL hailed its 10-megawatt Babcock battery as the largest storage project ever built alongside a solar farm in the U.S. But the utility recently announced a 409-megawatt battery project alongside a solar farm in Manatee County, four times larger than the largest on earth today. And Matt Valle, FPL vice president for development, says he’s sure there will be larger ones in the works when it comes online in 2021, though maybe not 40 times larger. Utilities are scrambling to shed dirty and costly assets; FPL will shut down its last coal plant this year, and its new megabattery will allow it to retire its two least-efficient gas plants. The company liked its Babcock solar plant so much that it has built 15 identical ones in Florida, and has more than 100 additional ones in the pipeline as it tries to install 30 million panels by 2030. Low-cost storage will help it manage its peaks and match supply to demand as its grid gets greener.

[link:https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/29/trump-wrong-about-wind-power-electricity-battery-storage-226755|