Britain’s £246m battery challenge won’t solve energy storage problem

By Paul Homewood

Renewable energy’s share of British electricity generation from wind and solar technologies reached record levels of 26% in the past year. This is excellent news for our national carbon emissions, but the grid is under increasing pressure to manage this intermittent power supply.

The on-and-off nature of renewable energy means that to avoid unexpected blackouts and surges it must be integrated into the national electricity grid alongside energy storage. That is the challenge that lies in the background as the UK government announced it will invest £246m in research funding on a four-year energy storage strategy focusing on battery innovation.

It is hoped that the “Faraday Challenge” will break down barriers to new battery technologies and introduce new business models. The plan is to establish a Battery Research Institute and drive innovation, particularly for the electric vehicle industry. However, the plan’s size and scope sends mixed signals to the energy storage sector and brings confusion on the longer-term direction.

The Faraday Challenge is focusing on known technology, looking for innovation in established and publicly recognised lithium-ion batteries. But on top of the well-known lead-acid (car) and lithium-ion (electronics) batteries, there are many alternative technologies for energy storage.

These include a range of other electrochemical storage devices, such as sodium-sulfur, metal-air, sodium-ion, flow batteries, and supercapacitors, as well as other energy storage devices such as pumped-hydro, flywheels, compressed-air (CAES), and superconducting magnets (SMES).

As shown in the graphic below, these technologies can be assessed by their power output and by the duration for which they can deliver this power (energy stored).

The US, Germany, Australia, South Africa, Korea and China are all ahead of the UK in lithium-ion technology. The government’s intervention is dwarfed by Tesla’s Gigafactory, built for US$5 billion (£3.8 billion) to produce half a million car batteries a year when in full production – and by the recent announcement about the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in Australia. China produces 55% of all lithium-ion batteries globally. These are daunting glimpses of the scale at which competing nations are tackling battery storage technology.

In truth though, it is not investment in more lithium-ion research that would give Britain a foothold. It should be genuinely original and fundamental research into new, breakthrough technologies, perhaps with a focus on sustainable and low-cost materials. The Faraday Challenge fund, so far, does not seem to consider real innovation, but is looking for ready-to-roll technology – it is more like a grid subsidy, cloaked as a research fund.

No surprise then, that within a day of the Faraday Challenge launch, the government announced a ban on new diesel and petrol cars from 2040, coupled with a £255m fund for councils to tackle emissions. With such a deadline – and rising demand for electric vehicles globally – is the government forcing the hand of energy storage researchers to focus solely on lithium-ion innovation? Furthermore, the National Grid committed more than £66m to deploying medium-scale frequency response energy storage projects last year, all based on lithium-ion technology.

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It is a sign of the times when a supposed energy expert can’t even get her numbers right about electricity generation:

Renewable energy’s share of British electricity generation from wind and solar technologies reached record levels of 26% in the past year

The actual figure for wind and solar is 14%, with the other 12% coming from burning trees and hydro:

As for the gist of the article though, I suspect the authors are right that the relatively small amount of money offered will make little difference.

As they note, China already produces 55% of the world’s lithium batteries, and no doubt that they will continue to dominate.

While their appeal for more money for breakthrough technologies is understandable, they show naivety about the position the government has boxed itself into.

The mad rush to decarbonise needs solutions now, not in 20 years time. Any objective observer would realise the logical answer would be to suspend decarbonisation until technology comes along with something better that works.