Hey. Welcome, everybody. Welcome back. We're discussing now storage. We've talked about different storage technologies, about storage markets. As I've said throughout this storage piece of the course, there's a lot changing very quickly in storage world. So I've called upon a good friend and colleague who works in storage, who has years of experience in storage to tell us about what's actually going on in the storage industry and storage markets. Welcome, John Glassmire to the course. Good to have you with us John. I'll open with a big picture question, what can storage do for electricity systems? So when I get asked these questions, which is something that comes up a lot in the work I do, the way I like to start by characterizing storage is essentially when you look at how electricity networks were developed and evolved over the past 100 plus years, we had this idea, that of supply and demand. Anytime you open up a basic textbook on the fundamentals and theories of electoral networks, they had this concept that supply must meet demand, and storage is expensive, therefore. So what we're now entering in is, it's not that storage is suddenly available, it's really more that storage is essentially becoming more cost-effective. You've had these dramatic price declines specifically on some of the battery technologies that have enabled battery energy storage systems to become more affordable and start offering new values into networks, and changing how we think about our electricity system. So I believe you asked, what was the question? What can storage do for electricity systems? Yeah. So you have this changing paradigm. That means that you can have storage coming in and offering new sets of things that it can offer. It can do it at the centralized transmission level, in terms of ensuring that bulk generation is better aligned with the needs across a large area network, you can have it out into the distribution networks where you may have some constraint. You may deploy storage as what they call a non-wires alternative challenging traditional planning of how you may electrify and bring electricity out to the network. You can also take it behind the meter where you'll have customers using storage as a medium to renegotiate how they interact with their utility providers. It is three big areas. You have the front of the meter, which is the transmission and distribution entity storage, as well as behind the meter, meaning on the customer side. Essentially what it allows you to do is provide okay, I think the way that a lot of people think about it when they think about a battery energy storage system, or a real energy storage, any energy storage system, is a way to take energy that's available when you don't need it and move it to a time when you do need. That's only one piece of the puzzle because, when you start interfacing the waves and interconnecting them into networks, they're also using a lot of high power electronics and a lot of really smart controls that allow you to not only do that bulk moving of energy, or arbitrage as it's sometimes called, but stabilize the network. What does that mean in each of those three areas? So if you are behind the meter, what that might mean is, if the lights go off or there's some sort of disruption from your utility provider, you can have it there to keep your lights on, keep your whatever services you're trying to do running. They have these things where you can put a battery energy storage system behind the meter with you at your facility, or house, or whatever, and if the power goes down, you can keep the lights on, keep everything moving to a seamless island, they call it watts. You essentially, if you're really there as a user of electricity in that area, you won't even know that the utility may have gone down. That same concept can put it out into the distribution network. If there's a problem in the distribution network, what that stability that it provides can help you do is it can help you let's say you've put a lot of renewables into a network that suddenly start pushing electricity in ways that you didn't expect it, the storage can stabilize that network, and take in that energy, and move it to a time when you do need it. Focusing on that example, because we're talking a lot about renewables in the course and you've articulated nicely how storage can play nicely with renewables, have you experienced examples, case studies, utilities, grids that are doing that? How's that going? Are we at the point we can say, "yes, storage can integrate variable renewables or assist more of it," or it's still more of an idea that we're not sure if actually is going to pan out. Yeah. We've already addressed that they're becoming increasingly affordable. They need to do so. The question really becomes not if it's affordable, but where is it affordable? Where is it useful? I reflect back on somebody. Oh, I'm sorry. That's okay. Just getting a phone call from my father-in-law. No problem. If I reflect back on where I've seen storage going into electricity networks, that the areas where you started seeing the first deployment of them really at large levels was in remote areas. Part of the reason was that electricity in remote areas is very expensive and the other, because it's expensive, it gave away for renewables as those costs have come down, specifically solar in particular, that's solar, became more affordable. You start using that to displace traditional providers of electricity in remote areas, diesel and you'd bring in with that, we've got to us enough solar. You want to start bringing in battery energy storage systems to ensure that you, getting back to this concept, stabilize them in these remote areas. The concept of those often called microgrids. These microgrid concept in a remote microgrid, you basically would bring in renewables together with storage, and that would allow you to decouple from your expensive diesel generation. That combination together was really powerful because solar, say take solar as an example. Of course, the sun only shines during the day, but we want to use electricity at night. So you can put the solar and storage together and you start moving that sunlight to the night. But as we started doing this, you start with that concept and start doing this in practice, the other challenge is you start bringing in solar and you start putting so much solar energy into your network, you end up wanting to turn off your diesel generator. When you want to turn off your diesel generator, you find that solar on its own can't really do that. So you bring in the battery energy storage, and those together provide a set of services that allow you to completely turn off those traditional generation assets. I really like starting in this conversation around these remote areas. We start talking about what's the role of storage and renewables together and sort of see it evolving in that space and all that solar and wind to a certain extent as well, start getting so affordable and now that storage is following in that train, getting incredibly affordable. They're starting to move away from these remote areas into an area that we're calling the grid edge. Because it's areas that may be loosely coupled to the network and increasingly into the heart of the network. You can see this pathway where you start in these remote areas where energy is expensive and you start putting these technologies out, these renewables and storage together to turn off expensive polluting diesels in those areas. You can see it start moving into the mainland utilities where the power prices are a little lower traditionally, so it's a little bit slower path. But this gives you a sort of idea about you start in the idea of displacing. You start with the most expensive things and you work your way as your costs come down to get towards the lower cost. If we think about storage migrating to the main stream in this transition, what do you see that the technical challenges for batteries? What are the problems we need to solve, if any, for batteries, I shouldn't not say batteries, for storage to play the role that we think it probably can in traditional utility scale electricity systems? I agree with you. I sometimes use batteries and storage interchangeably. I think that's probably at this point a reasonable thing to do just because batteries are so affordable. At this point, in terms of a lot of the other energy storage mediums. But there's been a long evolution. We started with hydro and then you started hearing a lot around lead acid became a technology of choice as well as fly wheels were really prevalent for awhile, but a lot due to electric vehicles you see the price coming down because adding up, you're getting economies of scale. These Gigafactories that are churning out batteries that then provide low-cost storage that you can basically pair with these high-power electronics and smart controls to rethink how you use your network. The question really becomes not so much a technical question, and it's an economic question. I think technically, there's always room for technical innovation. I think there's room for technical innovation, in the battery chemistries that we're using. There's room for continuing innovation on high power electronics to try and get faster responses, higher speed. That will all help help. But I don't want to oversimplify but a lot of the technical side of things, are to a large extent solved. More research always needed. But at this point, it's really more of an economic question of, how do you scale up? How do you leverage this? Where do you put that in today? Where do you put it in as the cost declines. You start looking at this, it also becomes a very significant policy and regulatory challenge, because you have, take the US, for example. The US ecosystem. It actually started with a Microgrid at the Pearl Street Station under Edison. It was actually DC distribution, then you had it evolve. They started realizing, you could achieve economies of scale of interconnecting generation plants. You saw this, massive over 100 plus years, this massive machine, the world's largest machine evolve, across the continent of North America. There's been a significant amount of policy development, to support that. You think about that, where you're running one set of wires between generation and households, because you don't want to over-invest. That means you have layers of monopoly considerations that go into your policies, which makes it. The net result is, you end up with an industry that's very conservative and very highly regulated. Now, hitting an inflection point where a new set of generation, a new technology, a new storage. Storage, which was not even really thoroughly considered when a lot of the policies were developed, has become affordable. Those policy considerations, become really paramount, in terms of, how does this evolve in our energy ecosystem. Very insightful, we're just out of time. Let me ask one question in closing. Where do you see the storage industry and market going in the short term? By that I mean, the next three or so years, do you expect it to just take off? Is it not yet clear? What's your prediction? We don't know what's going to happen to the future, but we can make educated guesses. What's your educated guess? Well, yeah, if you go to a particular jurisdiction in the US, say the California market. I saw this living at home. You can go and you can look at what they call these interconnection cues. There are thousands of gigawatts of people inline to put storage into the California system. What's going to happen in3-4 years? I think it's already happened. We are on a path where a lot of this technology is going to be put in. You look at the next 3-4 years. It's a bunch of, this market is really maturing fast. It's incredibly dynamic. But to a certain extent, we know a lot of it will go in, and we know it's going to be based, in large part, on battery energy storage systems, with two dominant lithium ion types of technologies that will be going in at massive scales. You'll also see, I think it gets lost in the conversation, as you start talking about thousands of gigawatts of this and it's mind-boggling. There's also going to be increased use of batteries for how we get around in transportation, which is what battery in everyone's home, as well as, possibly stationery battery in everyone's home and at every business slowly evolving. You're going to see, that's where we'll be in probably 20 years of batteries everywhere. But in the next 3-4 years we're just going to see rapid acceleration towards that Great, well, on that exciting vision of future, I want to say thanks Mr. John Glassmire, a storage and battery expert for joining us today. Thanks so much, John. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Dr. Coleman.
