Back in 2016, I was serving as founder and executive director of the California Energy Storage Alliance (CESA). CESA is membership-based trade association and advocacy group that has helped build California into one of the world’s most robust energy storage markets. At that time, CESA did not know exactly where California was headed with clean energy, but we did know other jurisdictions, such as Hawaii, were committing to 100% renewable portfolios.
The CESA team was curious – if California created a similar clean energy goal, how would that drive California’s energy storage needs? To answer this question, we performed a simple exercise. The CESA team took one year’s worth of daily loads from CAISO OASIS data and ran a model that increased the wind and solar on the system until total production matched total energy consumption. Then we plotted the results for every day of the year, as shown in Figure 1.
The resulting graphic clearly demonstrated that in a very high, 100% renewable scenario, multi-day and seasonal energy storage solutions would be required to balance the grid. At that time, the largest form of energy storage within CESA’s membership was pumped hydro, and even that could not offer nearly enough capacity for seasonal energy storage needs.
Driven by curiosity and resolve, I started a search for a technologically and economically feasible seasonal energy storage solution for California and beyond. I spoke to experts far and wide and evaluated solutions from major energy companies to startups. From my explorations, it became clear: of the commercially available solutions, green hydrogen was the only low-carbon, potentially economically viable option to support seasonal, dispatchable, scalable energy storage for the grid.
In my research, I learned that hydrogen was a mature industrial commodity, with approximately 70 million metric tons sold each year around the world – and that virtually all of this hydrogen produced is sourced from fossil fuels. I also learned analysts were predicting that with the increasingly low cost of wind and solar, green hydrogen via electrolysis would become cost competitive with grey hydrogen (hydrogen made from fossil fuels) in coming years.
Even more exciting, my research uncovered the amazing flexibility of hydrogen molecules. For example, hydrogen gas can power the grid via multiple pathways, either through conversion in a fuel cell or by direct combustion in a gas turbine. Indeed, many gas turbines were already able to combust a blend of natural gas and hydrogen, and several leading manufacturers, such as Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems and Siemens, were developing new gas turbines that could consume 100% hydrogen gas.
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