Hype Busters From Lux Research Explain Grid Based Energy Storage
Posted: 08 Dec 2011 07:07 AM PST
John Petersen
In 1883 Thomas Edison said, “The storage battery is one of those peculiar things which appeals to the imagination, and no more perfect thing could be desired by stock swindlers than that very selfsame thing. … Just as soon as a man gets working on the secondary battery it brings out his latent capacity for lying.”
The problem isn’t so much the batteries, which haven’t improved all that much over the last century. Instead, the problem lies in the fertile imaginations of scientists, engineers, politicians, ideologues, analysts and investors who focus on new energy storage applications, overestimate the potential, underestimate the challenges and make a quantum leap from the reasonable to the absurd. There is no issue in the energy storage sector that’s more wildly over-estimated than the short- to medium-term potential for using manufactured energy storage devices in the electric grid.
This week, the Smart Grid Intelligence Team at Lux Research, aka the hype busters, presented a 46 minute webinar on the current state of the grid-based energy storage market and its likely development over the next few years. After listening to the live webinar I asked Lux if they’re be willing to share their work with my readers and they graciously agreed. Readers who want to listen to the entire webinar can do so by clicking on this link to “Grid Storage: Connecting dots in a fragmented market.” For readers who don’t have the time for the webinar, I’ll try to summarize some of the highlights.
While respected institutions like Sandia National Laboratories have estimated that grid based energy storage represents a $200 billion opportunity, the global installed base of manufactured energy storage devices cost about $1.1 billion, roughly half of that capacity was built in 2011, and a similar amount of new capacity will be added next year. The following table offers a more granular analysis that allocates the installed base and planned additions, expressed in millions of dollars, among the five storage technologies Lux evaluated.