We usually think about renewable energy in terms of its sources, such as wind turbines and solar panels. But that’s only half the picture—we also need renewable storage.
Outside, Piconi and I went to find the trolley we’d seen on the screen. We walked past tall blocks of various compositions, as though we were at a construction site for the pyramids, before coming upon Vahe Gabuchian, the test engineer who was controlling the trolley. He had studied fracture mechanics at Caltech, and wanted to know if any of the components would crack during thousands of miles of rolling and vibration.
Developing energy storage is risky. Unlike Quidnet, Energy Vault is publicly traded; it has a market cap of more than a billion dollars, but its future is uncertain. The technology is still in its early stages, and it can be hard to tell how much of the excitement about the company reflects salesmanship, as opposed to viable engineering. No one has built a facility like EVx before, and the system contains moving parts that might break down more than expected.
Just as you can store potential energy by lifting a block in the air, you can store it thermally, by heating things up. Companies are banking heat in molten salt, volcanic rocks, and other materials. Giant batteries, based on renewable chemical processes, are also workable. In so-called flow batteries, tanks can be used to manage electrolytes, which hold a charge.
Litzelman believes that energy-storage systems will eventually bring down the over-all cost of decarbonization, but acknowledged that they might not be an easy sell. “The grid, in quotation marks, is not a customer,” one of his colleagues likes to say. Real customers are independent power producers, utilities, and companies that run factories or data centers. One challenge is figuring out who pays for what.
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