IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2017 - 108

in my view (continued from p. 112)
intense across resource types, storage
was still selected to meet large portions
of this new build demand.
With the established track records of
PJM and Chile, where storage has been
beating coal and gas plants in the market every day for years, and through the
procurement results in California and
Great Britain, where storage is chosen
on a least-cost best-fit basis, it can no
longer be said that storage is not competitive with other electricity investment choices.

Gigascale Supplier
Ecosystem Delivering
Today
With the growing success of advanced
storage in marketplaces around the
world, many have turned their focus to
the scalability of these solutions. Over
the past two years, Twitter feeds have
buzzed with progress of the Tesla Motors agreement with Panasonic to supply batteries for the so-called "gigafactory." This is the latest high-profile news
to demonstrate that lithium-ion technology is the most established battery solution for the grid available today. While
the new marketing is exciting, the reality is that there are many gigafactories
around the world, and several are being
built each year by names we know such
as LG Chem, Samsung, and Panasonic
(sans Tesla).
The most reputable, experienced,
and bankable of these battery component manufacturers collect in excess of
US$100 billion in annual revenues for
sales across the industries they serve.
Building on their strong track record,
over the next five years, grid-ready battery manufacturers have the capability to
deliver 200 GW of grid resources-that
is more than the total installed capacity
of all pumped hydropower worldwide
(the long-standing king of storage tech).
A recent GTM Research report
identified that over 95% of grid storage
deployed in 2016 was some form of lithium-ion. For nearly 20 years, lithiumion technology has steadily improved
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and proven to be dependable, scalable,
and cost-effective for industries like
consumer electronics and telecommunications. With this maturity and increasing demand from transportation
and the grid, the economics and scale
are only getting better.

Proven and Promising
Solutions
Storage technologies are usually put in one
of two buckets by the industry and media,
proven (i.e., pumped hydro) or promising
(i.e., battery startup X), but there is a third
category-proven AND promising. At
the moment, lithium-ion is alone in this
category. It is unique in enabling grid solutions that are scalable, dependable, cost
competitive, and smart.
At lower than US$1,000/kW and falling, lithium-ion-based power plant alternatives are already less expensive than
inefficient peaking power plants for flexibility and can be sited where we need
them. At AES, I have had the privilege
to see AES Energy Storage successfully
deploying batteries on the grid in commercial grid applications for a decade.
The AES Energy Storage fleet and its
fourth-generation Advancion solution
have proven that lithium-ion batteries deliver on the promise of a cleaner, more
resilient power system.
While battery arrays can accommodate new technologies in the future, cost-effective, safe, and reliable
lithium-ion battery arrays are operating
and available now. It is estimated that
US$2-3 billion dollars per year are
spent on lithium-ion battery development, and this is likely to increase over
the next decade in parallel with increasing demand for smaller, lighter, and
more energy-dense batteries. All of the
amazing progress with lithium-ion does
not mean that we should stop hoping for
breakthrough progress in new storage
technologies, but it does mean that we
as an industry do not need to depend on
hope and R&D as our only strategy for
robust storage on the grid-it has been
here for years.

Approaching TelecomClass Dependability
Through Design
Advanced battery-based energy storage is allowing us to change our assumptions about what we can achieve
in our industry in terms of system reliability. The best peaking power plants
in our industry attain 95% availability.
The best data centers in the world have
99.999% availability-or better. But
how is that possible? Computers are
fragile, unpredictable, and laden with
software bugs, but it doesn't matter,
due to how they are put together. With
the right architecture, problems are
isolated and rendered irrelevant. Maintenance can be performed without shutdowns. Upgrades can take place during operation. Downtime drops from
weeks to minutes per year.
Battery arrays are massively parallel and designed to expect the unexpected-like their data center cousins.
When one node of an array is unavailable, either by operator choice or due to
an unexpected occurrence, other nodes
in the array step in to compensate. Individual nodes are monitored multiple
times per second to ensure a smooth and
seamless operation. Since a typical array has hundreds of nodes, it can suffer a
multitude of failures without any immediate operational impact. As needs and/
or storage technology change, this same
architecture accommodates the addition
of new nodes with new capabilities and
integrates their operation accordingly.
These telecom-like characteristics of the
best battery solutions compare quite favorably to the architecture of other grid
resources like power plants, with their
large single points of failure and engineered-to-order designs.

All-Source Comparison
Key to Market
Transformation
With advanced grid storage racking
up its impressive checklist of proven
competitiveness, massive scale, and unmatched characteristics for -reliability,
september/october 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2017