'Long-duration energy storage can be deployed faster and more cheaply than green hydrogen'

As governments around the world grapple with the urgent conundrum of how simultaneously to make their supplies more secure, greener and cheaper, energy storage stalwart Alan Greenshields is worried that what he terms the “missing piece” of the puzzle isn’t drowned out by the buzz around other transition technologies — wind, solar, lithium-ion batteries, and loudest of all, hydrogen.

“Renewables have become the cheapest form of generation. Lithium-ion has done a fantastic job for mostly regulation functions in the grid, but we need cheap, bulk storage — that’s the missing piece.”

For example, the “EU has a lot of programmes for supporting new technologies – vast amounts of it have gone into hydrogen, almost nothing has gone into LDES”.

He adds: “The belief that hydrogen was the universal solution led for a significant period of time to LDES not being really taken seriously.”

In fact, the country did not until recently have a legal definition at all of what constituted energy storage on the German power grid, leaving battery storage lumped in as a generation asset.

The German approach, says Greenshields, was to go “very fast into feed-in tariffs for solar, for wind, phase out coal, phase out nuclear and replace it with natural gas – and basically walked right into a trap laid by Vladimir Putin”.

Now Germany is racing to end that dependency on gas and replace it “with cheap, plentiful green hydrogen, when it’s available”.

The bottom line, in Greenshields view, is that while hydrogen will have a major role to play in the energy transition – not least for decarbonising heavy industry and helping energy systems cope with multi-week periods of low wind and solar output – “there’s still not really high awareness that long duration storage can be deployed much faster and more cheaply than green hydrogen”.

So, is Germany now looking more seriously at LDES? Greenshields says the new coalition government has finally added a policy ‘bucket’ for storage, although “they haven’t defined what that means”.

If Germany is playing catch-up, when asked which governments around the world are best getting to grips with the policy challenges of LDES, the energy storage executive admits that the field is a slim one.

UK 'trying to work out right way'

Encouragingly, the UK is looking at the possible use in LDES of tools such as contracts-for-difference that have proved successful in stimulating other energy technologies.

Greenshields says enthusiasm around the world for LDES is growing, with jurisdictions from Australia to California looking at how to make the technologies part of their ambitious energy storage plans.

“The problem has always been, how do you make sure the people funding the assets are getting the financial benefit?

“Everyone says we’d like LDES — the question is how do you [establish] a monetisation system.”

Key, according to Greenshields, is getting LDES to scale and making it profitable on a non-subsidy basis.

“What we want is to get to the situation where the business models are such that it sucks in private capital.”

And if policymaking over LDES is immature, the industry veteran is encouraged by moves by “forward-thinking” corporations such as RWE. “We need them to be our champions,” he says.

“Hydrogen grabbed everyone’s attention [but] just as the prices of solar and wind and lithium-ion have plummeted, the cost of LDES has also now plummeted — it’s just happened later.

“There’s an awareness issue that things that were too expensive in 2014 are absolutely now competitive. It’s not rocket science, it’s the same sort of volume driven, technology driven improvement curves these other technologies have been through,” Greenshields concludes.