Battery Insiders Reflection - Stationary Battery Storage

0:00Transcript

0:00Welcome to Battery Insiders, your podcast providing you insights and the fascinating world of batteries. Hosted by Bhavya Jha and Simon Engelke. And we are back. Hey Bavia, how are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you? Very good. That was exciting. I think, yeah, we're just coming from a nice session on stationary, stationary batteries and stationary energy storage and grids. What do you think, Bavia? Any new thoughts? Well, I was excited to see or hear from more of our representatives in Australia. We had some folks joining in. Not only was it very late there, but also that is a region that is slowly, surely gaining more traction when it comes to electrification. But it's actually got a pretty old story, I think, now when it comes to energy storage. You know, with the first and biggest Tesla project there, the growing market, the growing need for it, especially given some of the climate change stories coming up. Like, for example, I think one person on the call mentioned, you know, everything that's happened this past week with the snowstorm in Texas and the loss of electricity.

1:20Well, in Australia, it's not snowstorms. It's rather the heat that causes that. And, you know, just getting a little bit more of the cultural and economic, political and environmental context on that call, I think, helps contextualize the upcoming and valuable role that Australia plays in energy and electrification. Of course, there's also some of the largest lithium mines there. So clearly you can tell I was fascinated by the Australia voices on the call. But what about you? No, I agree. I think it's, you know, this is like a little of a recap of one of ours we just said on Clubhouse with a really nice audience and really nice panel. And as you said, I think, you know, Australia was quite strong today. And it's what's nice because Australia, I think, is one of the most interesting countries where you hear in the news all the time, you know, they have these biggest batteries installed and all these things. And they have like all this lithium mines.

2:10Right. But I think there's still, they also sometimes have a long way to go still to really transform that grid because they're heavily relying on, you know, fossil fuels still like coal and these kind of topics and exporting it, et cetera. So, yeah, I think it was very encouraging to hear the voices there and kind of get, you know, get their, you know, the excitement about this and, you know, about opportunities in this space and not just in Australia. Right. We had people from Europe, but also the US and all kinds, Nigeria, et cetera. So I think it was a quite nice international discussion. And I think for me, one thing which really, you know, I thought was quite interesting for me today was the technology front. Right. I think we had, you know, we started with Australia talking a bit about this landscape, which was really interesting. And then we came to where kind of what technologies are available and what technologies do people believe in going to have like, you know, the biggest impact in the stationery market.

3:01And what actually was interesting to me was, you know, at least from the voices raised in the room, which of course is a subset was that lithium-ion is really the technology to play, you know, the biggest, like, you know, have the biggest impact. And I think the discussion really came back to, if you have stationery, it's really like, it's, it's not just, you know, it's not like, you know, like a phone where you have like two years or something, right. And you might get a new one, but stationery installations really have to last a long time. Right. You want like 20 years plus. So if you now put something in place today, it actually has to be, you know, functioning still in 20 plus years. So you can't really experiment as much maybe as with other technologies, because you have to essentially underwrite when you install it, this is going to last this number of years, which I just found interesting, you know, I think from the developer perspective, right.

3:50We had a few people from the finance and, you know, installation side, and they would always say, we need technologies where we can bank on them. You know, they're bankable. I think that's what the term they used. I get a bank to finance this because the bank knows this school going to be running in this amount of years, which I think is, you know, for some of us who are very excited about new technologies, you know, it's a very important, you know, reflection on, you know, you know, how ready is my technology, let's say. And I think for stationery technology, it really has to last to, to be, you know, financially attractive. What are the other options that have come up for stationery, you know, for the sake of our audience and for the sake of recap? Totally. Yeah. I think today came up energy vault, which is, which was really hyped up. It was a big company. And it was also the kind of reflection, you know, if you heard much from them recently, if you listen to this and you are from energy vault, you're really welcome to join us in a future session to, to get your perspective.

4:47And I think, so here was kinetic energy, right? Like potential kinetic energy, where you just take concrete blocks and you essentially put them above each other. That's how you store energy. And when you get energy back, you just, you know, putting essentially use a crane to, you know, put down the, the concrete blocks again. And that's kind of a way to store. It's a bit like, you know, water pumped hydro in a way, just more in a maybe smaller setting in a way, right? And you can put it anywhere because it was pumped hydro, which of course is still one of the biggest energy storage technologies you need to, you know, you need the lakes and all this, you know, you need to write landscape, you can say in the space, which also has consequence right to nature, et cetera. Another one, which I think we quickly discussed was a redox flow. We didn't talk about too much. I know there's some really smart people out there working on this, but the thing here is, you know, it also often has been, you know, named as technology, which lasts a long time.

5:37That's I think often the, you know, the two arguments for, for three arguments for redox flow have been, you know, you can decouple power from energy storage capacity, which, you know, you kind of really do with batteries. If you put more batteries in place, you also increase your power, but you might not need that. And another thing was, you know, materials, you don't need lithium, et cetera. But, you know, we can talk about this, this is really a big issue right now. And then the third thing would be, you know, I mean, cost was one where it was supposed to be cheaper. But I think also here we brought up, right, that the cost of lithium has dropped so much, it makes it more tricky. And then the last thing, the fourth thing, you know, to add to this one as well is they often have been named as this technology, which would last a long, long time, but have a really long life cycle, you know, from the chemistry, because degradation was supposed to be less of an issue.

6:28Interestingly enough, at least, you know, the place I've been visiting, often these systems actually have been down because of, you know, like all this mechanics, et cetera. So actually to maintain them wasn't at least, but that's a very like personal view, right, from the installation I've been observing have been, had more issues, let's say, than with lithium-ion batteries, which goes a bit back to the bankable, right? It's really tough to have a technology if it's not, you know, skilled in a way, you know, like if you have one technology which exists everywhere, let's say, of course, you know, you have much more learnings about it, how to run it more efficiently, et cetera. But if you have a new technology, which is only installed in a few places, you know, I've been observing it can be quite challenging to get a robustness into place, which you have as other techniques, like lithium-ion, for example, which is highly scaled at this point. Is it fair to say that of the technologies you mentioned, the most prevalent right now is lithium-ion?

7:21I mean, this was mentioned today, you know, from the audience, from the panel. And I mean, personally, I think, yeah, lithium-ion really is one where there's a lot of, you know, still potential, like just from the scalability. And I think it really comes down to also think about who are the drivers right now, right, for storage. And the biggest driver, I think, we have had studies on this, you know, I think there's some great studies also from the World Economic Forum on this and others as well, which really show that essentially this decade is the biggest demand for energy storage, and specifically batteries comes from the automotive sector, right? Yes, repurposed batteries. Let's talk about it. Exactly, which is that great segue. And yeah, so I think just to make sure, right, so I think stationary will be interesting to see if this accelerates, but at least when we looked at this two years ago, we thought, you know, energy storage will be a battery, like essentially automotive going to be the battery driver, and then stationary will be back, will be built based on that because technology is so, you know, there's so many batteries that are available, and the costs are so low, and it's so, you know, scaled.

8:23But yeah, let's talk about, if you want, like about Second Life and how you merge these two. Well, when you talk about transitioning from automotive to energy storage or stationary storage, there are a couple of questions that come into mind, some of which are already at play. One is, how is that being regulated? In some cases, I think there are some case studies actually in the UK where people have taken automotive cars and fitted them to, sorry, automotive batteries and fitted them to their homes. Well, from an energy efficiency perspective, yeah, that's great. It's ideal. But what are the safety standards around it? How is, who's regulating that at a more local level? In the case of any of those, you know, thermal hazards posed by that battery, is the customer aware? Do local firemen know how to handle this? This is actually, this was actually ended up being a significant portion of my Fulbright research with the UK team. So we don't have answers for these right now, but that has been one concern and a significant one that I, that came to mind to me during today's conversation.

9:34The second thing I would say is how feasible is it to take a battery with the chemistry and the fit for a, for, for an automotive vehicle to fit it to a stationary, for a stationary use? What, what does that mean for how the chemistry is? Would there need to be modifications made? Is it that easy to do like a swap out or a trade in, however you want to look at it? Um, I, I don't know. I think it's the, I, in theory, I think it sounds great. I think there's, um, high value in, and high return in the life of one battery to repurpose it, but I don't know how feasible and really how safe it is to do that. Yeah. And I think, I mean, we won and that's really, you know, recent, um, we can see more and more automakers, um, moving to LFP, right? Iron phosphate batteries, um, you know, to, to not use NMC as you mentioned before. And I think LFP have been used in stationary quite widely as well.

10:37So I think it's actually interesting that there is, you know, um, two things coming together, right? Where LFP is now used also in cars because before, as you, you know, you could say, is it really worthwhile to take the NMC batteries and put them into stationary afterwards? Um, but if you have LFP, maybe that's interesting, you know, it's, it's kind of the same chemistry. On the other hand, it might also be, you know, that the, you know, the financial aspect, you know, after kind of thing, does it make sense because the batteries already become so much cheaper in the, the first edition. So I think, yeah, it's a very fascinating topic. And as you said, policy is probably a big one to, to, to disseminate that as well. Maybe just one quick thing. I don't, I'm not sure if you know how much you know about this, but I, at least I hear from, from a German perspective, often issue with stationary is that, um, it's, you know, it hasn't been as attractive, let's say financially to, to have stationary sometimes because it couldn't really, I don't know, I heard like about, you know, you have to pay extra fees, et cetera, if you sell back electricity to the grid from your batteries, et cetera.

11:35So some of these things, I, at least, I don't know too much about this, but I've heard this can be a roadblock. Um, and I, I think in the UK, for example, right, we had this example of Nissan Leaf, Nissan Leaf's essentially trading electricity for you. Um, I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on, are there any roadblocks right now for like, you know, the upscale of, um, grid, grid storage, um, from a policy perspective? In the U S I would say the, well, you know, the biggest example I can think of was the automotive subsidies that we had in California. I want to say until 2018, like December, 2018. Um, and that was actually quite an incentive is I, uh, my like local experience in California showed me that people are buying elect, they were buying electric vehicles and with the hope of having, um, achieving subsidies. And as, um, as a resident, I, um, felt that PG and E was, you know, I think like one month a year, my bill was always subsidized for like energy saving reasons.

12:40Um, so I think that, you know, policy has that potential to influence those, um, incentives, those financial incentives for customers at the state and local levels. I hear you on the Europe exam Euro examples as well, but I'm not too familiar with, um, some of the cases you've mentioned. I have heard rather it's not so much on the stationary front, but on the automotive front, I know that, you know, this goes back to perhaps even a separate conversation, but there are, I think there is a car producer in the, in the, in Europe who sells the car, leases the battery and when the battery comes back, uses it for storage. So it's not the same thing as the Nissan scheme, but I do see the potential for automotive makers to have, to affect this, um, upstream positively at least. Yep. No, and I think it's, you know, it's, there's still a lot of things which still have to be figured out, right? I think what's the most effective.

13:37And I think one important thing is also to look at, you know, essentially, you know, that also people look at what other countries are doing, right? And to see maybe if some of these things, you know, made sense and did it happen. I think, you know, a lot of has happened in China, of course, also from policy, but also implementation side, but also in other places around the world. And I think right now what's really exciting that there is a lot of interest in this topic. There's a lot of, you know, movement. And, um, we can see a lot of implementation, um, scale up. So, yeah, I think that the decade can be quite interesting, but I think I still personally believe, you know, that I think this is really the decade for, um, automotive in a way, but also mobility, not just, you know, cars, but also micro mobility, um, drones and all this really exciting new ways of transport, um, you know, ship trains, et cetera.

14:21And, um, and I think personally energy storage will have a massive impact if I just think about the, you know, storage like perspective on energy access, which actually going to be topic. We also can talk about because there are billions of people in the world who don't have access to energy yet. And I think actually here microgrids and batteries plus solar and wind, um, can be a really nice way to, you know, decentralize energy rather than have centralized energy source as we had so far, um, majorities in the grid. Yeah, absolutely. I think we know these technologies and the places we've talked about today are, you know, always in the headlines for adopting or changing, making changes locally to, um, ease accessibility. Of course there's work to be done, but the reason I'm actually interested in all of this is where, how, where, when, and how does this get to other remote areas where the need is more dire, I would almost say. So I'm excited for next week's conversation.

15:23I guess we'll have to see who joins then. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And also, I mean, you know, yeah, absolutely. I think it would be exciting and yeah, join us for that. And also we're going to release some more of the other previous conversations on here as well. So maybe that's a bit of a mix and order, but at least on Clubhouse, the next week's conversation is going to be about energy access. And that's a really big one as well. Wonderful. Thanks so much, Bavia. It was fun. Great. Talk next week. Talk next week. Bye.