Breakthroughs in energy storage are turning cars and homes into electricity providers.
By David Stringer
August 2, 2019, 9:00 PM GMT-3
From
It's just a marketing gimmick. But it casts a spell.
A pale orange-and-gold sunset bathes the macadamia plantations and avocado orchards that sweep down to Australia's Byron Bay. The coming dusk is a cue for two sleek Tesla battery packs in the garage at Amileka, a secluded holiday villa nearby. They stir silently into action—powering the appliances in the five-bedroom home's twin kitchens, recharging a $100,000-plus Model X SUV, driving a filter pump for an 18-meter swimming pool sparkling in the shade of a century-old native black bean tree.
From first lighton this Southern Hemisphere autumn day, a bank of 33 rooftop solar panels has been capturing the sun's energy. At times, the electricity is directed back to the local grid. But mostly it's funneled into the garage and stored in Powerwall units, in the same type of rechargeable cells that fuel the automaker's vehicles. The batteries—as tall as refrigerators, as thin as flat-screen TVs—will power this unusually energy-hungry villa deep into the evening.
But not all night. The solar array and batteries meet just half of Amileka's average energy needs. So after a few hours, the 25-acre, $1,160-a-night miniresort that Tesla Inc. uses to promote its products must tap into the local electricity grid.
The photogenic demonstration on Australia's eastern coast presents a vision of what some see as the most significant shift in the energy sector since the late 19th century: rechargeable batteries—in electric vehicles, homes, industrial plants, and power grids—that will make the transition to renewable energy possible.
The actual future of energy may be less postcard-worthy. It may look more like a fleet of electric school buses. And the end of utility companies as we know them.
"If you are wanting to run your home just on solar and batteries … it's going to be tough. … At this point it's pretty overstated"
By 2050 solar and wind will supply almost half the world's electricity, bringing to an end an energy era dominated by coal and gas, according to forecasts by BloombergNEF, Bloomberg LP's primary research service on energy transition.
It can't happen without storage. The switch from an electricity system supplied by large fossil fuel plants that run virtually uninterrupted to a more haphazard mix of smaller, intermittent renewable sources needs energy storage to overcome two key hurdles: using power harvested during the day to supply peak energy demand in the evening and ensuring there's power available even when the wind drops or the sun goes down.
"We think storage can be the leapfrog technology that's really needed in a world that's focused on dramatic climate change," says Mary Powell, chief executive officer of Green Mountain Power Corp., a utility based in Colchester, Vt., that's worked with Tesla to deploy more than 2,000 residential storage batteries. "It's the killer app in a vision to move away from bulk delivery systems to a community-, home-, and business-based energy system."
A Tesla Model X SUV fuels up at Amileka, a secluded holiday villa on Australia's eastern coast.
Photographer: Natalie Grono for Bloomberg Markets
Utilities aren't panicking yet. The prospect of large numbers of residential consumers moving fully off the grid is probably overstated, says Zak Kuznar, managing director of microgrid and energy storage development at Duke Energy Corp., a Charlotte-based utility that supplies electricity to more than 7.5 million customers in six American states. "If you are wanting to run your home just on solar and batteries," he says, "from where the technology is today, it's going to be tough. It's something we are keeping an eye on, but at this point it's pretty overstated."
Lithium-ion batteries continue to have limits in terms of the amount of energy they can store, and they're typically able to supply energy to grids for just hours at a time, not days or weeks. What's more, concerns are rising over the environmental costs of mining lithium in Chile's parched Atacama Desert and over a cobalt industry that's tarnished by the use of child labor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to supply battery manufacturers. And the sector is just beginning to prepare for the future need to recycle or dispose of a torrent of expired battery packs.
QuickTake: Better Batteries
Still, optimism abounds. Battery storage technology is nearing a tipping point like the one that accompanied the "massive" adoption of solar power some years ago, says David Frankel, a partner at McKinsey & Co. in Los Angeles whose clients include energy and industrial companies.
Mainstream adoption of electric cars is the third great stage in the transformation of the global energy sector—a natural outgrowth of the first two: the spread of cheaper renewable energy and the evolution of batteries, says Marcus Fendt, a managing director at Mobility House GmbH, a tech company in Munich.
And it's coming, however slowly. By 2040, according to a BNEF forecast in May, almost 60% of new car sales and about a third of passenger vehicles on the road will be electric.
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