Better batteries in store?

We can transform sunlight and wind into electricity. Why aren’t we using these free, limitless natural resources to provide all our power? Of course the answer to that is manifold, involving a lot of words like “deployment” and “technology to scale” and “existing model” and “lobbyists”. But all the little details aside, we actually couldn’t use renewable resources to power ourselves fully, and the one major hurdle standing in our way is storage.

Solar panels do a pretty decent job creating electricity during the daytime, but at some point, the sun does set. Likewise, wind turbines are kind of useless on a calm day. Without a way to store the energy produced by these technologies, the electricity can only be used at time of generation. We are still necessarily reliant on traditional energy sources to fill in the gaps (or nuclear, but let’s not open that can of worms right now). A recent Green Biz blog post points out that

Currently, electricity can’t be stored economically on a large scale except in systems that pump water uphill, then release it to generate hydropower. So-called pumped-storage systems, however, often consume more energy than they generate; they make sense only because water can be pumped uphill using cheap off-peak power, then released so the electricity can be sold during periods of peak demand when prices are higher.

Renewables call out for a better solution. Yet battery technology has lagged far behind energy production technology. With the pressure applied to the auto industry to find alternatives to the greedy combustion engine, some advances have finally been made as the all-electric car proceeds from futuristic fantasy to available at your local Chevy dealer with 0-percent financing for a limited time only.

Okay, you may be saying. So now we just plug our solar panels into car batteries? No, of course there’s a huge gap between electric car batteries and the kind of battery that would allow a power plant to operate solely on solar power or wind. R&D on this scale needs a great deal of money thrown at it. And who better to throw money at it than the richest man in the world? Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns 80% of MidAmerican Energy Holdings, a utility holdings company. At the behest of Buffett and his partner, Charlie Munger, Chairman David Sokol has navigated a relationship with the Chinese manufacturer BYD, which makes low-cost electric car batteries. Soon, MidAmerican will begin testing new batteries from BYD that could hold the key to utility-scale energy storage.

MidAmerican’s energy portfolio is 24% non-carbon emitting (solar doesn’t seem to play in, but wind and geothermal certainly do). Sokol has been working towards this goal for the past six years. His message on the MidAmerican website even comes out and says,

Global climate change solutions should be designed to encourage greater deployment of cost-effective energy efficiency programs and economically feasible renewable energy production. They should also provide adequate funding for research, development and deployment of a broad spectrum of innovative technologies targeting low or zero carbon emissions and carbon sequestration at reasonable costs.

You can take a tour on the website of where subsidiary companies’ renewable energy technologies contribute to the MidAmerican portfolio. This is a company that seems seriously committed to pushing a low-carbon future and additionally, has a vested interest in having first access to better energy storage. This partnership with BYD may produce a new wave of battery technology that can help make utility-scale renewable energy generation financially competitive at last. How long the R&D process will take is impossible to say, but the testing is set to begin “soon”, and BYD generally doesn’t waste any time.

How long it takes for this holy grail of storage to emerge on the residential solar PV and wind markets is another matter altogether. But it wasn’t so long ago that we all thought electric cars would go 15 miles per hour and look like Jetsonian bubble-cars–sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.