In early June, Highview Power announced that it had officially launched its first grid-scale liquid air energy storage (LAES) plant at the Viridor Pilsworth site in Bury, United Kingdom (just outside of Manchester). This five megawatt (MW)/15 megawatt-hour (MWh) facility is on the small side to truly earn the title of grid-scale, but that may be beside the point. The critical issue to consider here is that this new technology may ultimately prove to be a cost-effective long-duration energy storage resource that is – unlike compressed air energy or pumped hydro – geographically independent.
Three weeks after the June launch, Highview announced the hiring of Javier Cavada, who had previously served as President of Finnish energy giant Wärtsilä’s Energy Solutions division and Executive Vice President, as their new CEO. Cavada had overseen impressive growth in that division over the past three years and spent 17 years at Wärtsilä. These two announcements were enough to pique my curiosity, so when I had a chance to interview Cavada as well as Highview’s Director of Business Development, Matthew Barnett, I jumped at it.
Long-term storage technologies have had difficulty gaining market traction
There have been multiple long-duration energy start-ups and a few corporate corpses on the road (flow battery companies Enervault, Imergy, and Vizn – all of whom I have covered in past Forbes pieces – spring to mind) in recent years. There are also only a limited number of flow battery sites in operation.
Meanwhile, pumped hydro storage can deliver both capacity and energy, and represents about 95% of the country’s energy storage. As of 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated that there are 50 projects that could deliver 40,000MW of additional storage capacity. But none have been built recently, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District recently canceled its 400 MW pumped hydro project citing costs and financial risks. Pumped hydro also requires access to significant quantities of water, elevation, and an enormous amount of environmental permitting to withdraw water and construct reservoirs. So that resource probably won’t be the solution to the long-duration problem.
For its part, conventional compressed air energy storage requires enormous tight caverns – and there are simply not too many of those projects around (exactly two: one in Germany and the other in Alabama).
Lithium-ion: good for capacity and less so for long-term energy storage
Finally, lithium-ion is growing rapidly as a storage medium and is already found in multiple projects supporting renewables, supporting the grid, and displacing conventional resources. It’s a critical player in the storage sandbox. In fact, Pacific Gas & Electric recently requested permission from the California Public Utilities Commission for 568 MW/2270MWh. However, these lithium-ion based projects typically don’t support more than four hours of energy for every MW of capacity installed, so they won’t yet go the distance. I was, therefore, curious to find out why Highview might be different, and why they might succeed where others have encountered difficulties.
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