Quan­ti­fy­ing the value of stor­age tech­nolo­gies for solar and wind energy

Pro­fes­sor Jes­sika E. Trancik

Engi­neer­ing Sys­tems Divi­sion, MIT

Wind and solar energy indus­tries have grown rapidly in recent decades but still sup­ply only a small frac­tion of global elec­tric­ity. The con­tin­ued growth of these indus­tries, to lev­els that con­tribute to cli­mate change mit­i­ga­tion, will depend on whether they can com­pete against alter­na­tives that pro­vide energy on demand. Energy stor­age can trans­form inter­mit­tent renew­ables for this pur­pose but cost improve­ment is needed. Eval­u­at­ing diverse stor­age tech­nolo­gies on a com­mon scale has proven a chal­lenge, how­ever, due to their widely vary­ing per­for­mance along the two dimen­sions of energy and power costs. Here we devise a method to com­pare stor­age tech­nolo­gies, and set cost improve­ment tar­gets. Some stor­age tech­nolo­gies today are shown to add value to solar and wind energy, but cost reduc­tion is needed for wide­spread prof­itabil­ity. Opti­mal cost improve­ment tra­jec­to­ries are found to be rel­a­tively loca­tion invari­ant, and thus can inform tech­nol­ogy devel­op­ment strate­gies. These results demon­strate the ben­e­fits of pre­dic­tive eval­u­a­tion of energy tech­nolo­gies to accel­er­ate their devel­op­ment in the lab­o­ra­tory. Other recent work uncov­ers the deter­mi­nants of pho­to­voltaics’ unprece­dented cost improve­ment and how to con­tinue this trend, quan­ti­fies mobile bat­tery per­for­mance tar­gets for the elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of trans­porta­tion, and deter­mines methane emis­sions reduc­tion time­lines needed for nat­ural gas to serve as a tran­si­tion fuel.

Jes­sika Tran­cik is the Atlantic Rich­field Career Devel­op­ment Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Energy Stud­ies in the Engi­neer­ing Sys­tems Divi­sion at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy. She is also an exter­nal pro­fes­sor at the Santa Fe Insti­tute. She received her B.S. in mate­ri­als sci­ence and engi­neer­ing from Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity and her Ph.D. in mate­ri­als sci­ence from the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Before MIT, she spent sev­eral years at the Santa Fe Insti­tute as an Omid­yar Fel­low, and at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity as an Earth Insti­tute Fel­low, where she focused on energy sys­tems mod­el­ing. Her research eval­u­ates the dynamic costs and envi­ron­men­tal impacts of energy tech­nolo­gies to inform and accel­er­ate their development.