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| Wed, 18th Mar 2020 16:46:00 |
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Is Green Hydrogen The Future Of Energy Storage? |
The United States and China are in a race to the top of the energy storage game. Last year, the energy storage industry exploded in China, with Wood Mackenzie projecting that the country was poised to completely take over the sector, as its "cumulative energy storage capacity is projected to skyrocket from 489 megawatts (MW) or 843 megawatt-hours (MWh) in 2017 to 12.5 gigawatts (GW) or 32.1GWh in 2024," a significant increase "in the installed base of 25 times." As Oilprice reported in July, "thanks to the country’s major push for storage deployments in the last year, deploying 580MW (1.14GWh) to reach a cumulative market size of 1.07GW (1.98GWh) in 2018, China has already secured its position as the second biggest energy storage market in the Asia Pacific region in terms of deployment, with South Korea coming in first place."
Since then, a lot has changed. While the U.S. was never far behind China in energy storage deployment, it looks like they're catching up. Just last month the Financial Times proclaimed in a headline that: "U.S. solar industry powers ahead as investors back batteries." These batteries are being employed primarily as a complement to solar energy.
While the renewable energy sector is gaining a lot of traction and holds a lot of promise for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonizing the global economy in time to avoid the fast-approaching tipping point toward catastrophic climate change, wind and solar energy have a major drawback: they're variable. Being dependent on the weather means that sometimes you’ll get a lot of energy flow to the grid--even more than is needed--or none at all. This is where energy storage becomes essential to regulation and maintaining an even flow of energy to the grids that power our cities.
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