When batteries get a facelift, so does renewable energy

For years, renewable energy companies have faced a problem: How to store the mass amounts of energy they produce for later use. Batteries may be just the solution. In California, there's now enough grid-scale battery storage to power millions of homes for a few hours. Battery power is often the second largest source of energy on a given day in the state. So, we're revisiting the fast-growing technology with Cooper Katz McKim https://www.npr.org/people/1200794832/cooper-katz-mckim, a producer on The Indicator from Planet Money. Listen to the three-part battery series https://www.npr.org/series/1265481061/the-indicator-takes-on-batteries. Have questions about the future of energy? Contact us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Planet Visionaries. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers creating real climate solutions. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:12Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here with Cooper Katz-McKim, a producer at The Indicator from Planet Money, as he is...

• 0:26Emily Kwong?

  Wait, what are you doing, Cooper?

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Oh, Emily, hi. That's just me turning on and off the lights at a facility in California where there is battery power energizing the grid. Like, literally, holding energy and then releasing it onto the grid that powers all our homes.

• 0:42Emily Kwong?

  Interesting. But in California, I'd expect energy to be coming from places like natural gas or hydro. You're telling me batteries are in the mix?

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Gridscale battery storage is surprisingly, oftentimes, the second-largest source of energy on a given day in California.

• 0:55Emily Kwong?

  I didn't know that battery storage could be used at that level.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  I mean, just a few years ago, it was unimaginable. Gridscale storage like this, it was basically a dream technology for renewable companies, a what-if scenario.

• 1:07Emily Kwong?

  Right. And those companies historically have been using technologies at the whim of the weather. If the sun doesn't shine, solar energy isn't so great.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  If the wind doesn't blow, exactly. And battery storage, it changes that equation.

• 1:20Emily Kwong?

  Right, because you can store energy inside a battery somehow.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  And then tap into it whenever it's needed. Well, that dream tech is now very much mainstream. Around 2020 to 2021, battery storage capacity jumped 230% across the US.

• 1:36Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  More and more was added in '22, '23, and it really took off, particularly in California. To see it for myself, I showed up to a site called Cal Flats in central California. It's this 2,900-acre plot of land just covered in solar panels. There's, like, goats running around, there's little fox habitats.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  The extra energy generated from all that solar flows straight into batteries right on site.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  These containers you see with, you know, what is it, six or seven doors? And each one of these containers has a bunch of modules that would look like big suitcases that have the battery cells, the DC battery.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  That's Justin Johnson, the COO of Arivon, the company that owns Cal Flats. When we talk about battery storage, this is what people are referring to. Rows and rows of stacked battery suitcases, basically, in a container that's like eight feet high, basically a cabinet.

• 2:27Emily Kwong?

  Oh, that's kind of small. How much power is this site creating?

• 2:31Speaker 02

  So the site has enough storage capacity to provide electricity to around 60,000 homes for a few hours.

• 2:37Emily Kwong?

  Oh, that's a lot.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a lot. Arivon sells that energy to Apple and PG&E, the state's largest utility. Justin Johnson says there is no shortage of customers, though.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  If you have a solar plant, or a battery plant, or a combination, you know, a solar and battery plant, anywhere in the US that's ready to be built these days, you can find an off-taker.

• 3:02Emily Kwong?

  Right. I mean, so much more electricity is needed these days with so many electric vehicles on the road and new data centers for artificial intelligence.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Exactly. So Emily, today on the show, we tackle the technological reasons behind batteries taking off so fast and what's next for them.

• 3:19Emily Kwong?

  Let's go on a battery-powered magic carpet ride. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 3:36Speaker 00

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• 4:36Speaker 00

  This message comes from Planet Visionaries, the podcast celebrating the people creating practical, hopeful solutions for the planet's urgent conservation challenges. Hosted by legendary climber and advocate Alex Honnold, each episode goes beyond the headlines to show it's actually working and who's making it happen. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 5:02Emily Kwong?

  So grid-scale battery storage has taken off the past few years. But Cooper, a lot of different technologies have their moment. So why is this rise to the mainstream for battery tech different in some way?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's not like one day some company said, "We're going to make batteries powerful enough to support the grid." That would have been awesome, but it kind of has to go back a ways. The batteries I saw on Cal Flats, it arguably goes back to the 90s, when Sony introduced their camcorder with a little rechargeable battery inside of it. Dan Walter studies the rapid growth of electrotech like batteries.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  In the first sector, you roll out batteries that are just good enough for that sector, and they just meet the demands of the Sony camcorder.

• 5:47Emily Kwong?

  Hmm. These batteries, I feel like I've seen a descendant of them in my digital camera. They're the kind of boxy cube batteries that you can recharge.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Right. It's kind of satisfying to click in, that one.

• 5:59Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  We've all definitely used those batteries at some point. That's basically at the root of what Dan calls the battery domino effect.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  Because that is a growing market, and that market expands, you can create more and more factories that make batteries. And as you build more factories, it becomes cheaper, and the batteries become of higher quality.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Over time, people wanted longer-lasting and cheaper batteries, so companies had an incentive to develop them.

• 6:27Speaker 05

  You get a technology development that's very rapid, driven by a group of consumers that has a very high willingness to pay.

• 6:36Emily Kwong?

  We're battery hungry in the 90s and the aughts.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the whole story starts over as another sector finds use for that same battery, from camcorders to laptops, e-bikes, three-wheelers, cars. Each sector is full of people who want better batteries and will pay for it.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  It really has been a story of consumerism, but also clever policy of countries that have realized that there's a competitive advantage in winning batteries.

• 7:01Emily Kwong?

  What's astonishing about this story is I was alive during this battery revolution, and I witnessed it from childhood to now. And I kind of just took it for granted that battery tech was like racing to keep up with our voracious need. Then, you know, I think about electric vehicles coming along. I mean, those must have bumped this development even more. EVs are everywhere.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a perfect transition to Dan's second point, because the growth of EVs is a big part of this story. Long before others were investing in battery storage, like back in the aughts, leadership in China saw an opportunity with the technology and became a hub for manufacturing batteries. It wasn't a big market yet, but they saw an opportunity.

• 7:37Emily Kwong?

  Wow, okay.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  And as EVs got more popular, it drove the volume of larger, lighter, denser batteries way up, that made batteries way cheaper.

• 7:46Emily Kwong?

  How cheap are we talking?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Since 2010, the average cost of batteries has fallen more than 90%, which is one of the fastest cost drops of any energy technology ever.

• 7:56Emily Kwong?

  Whoa.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  It's grown into new markets, new countries. And by 2021, battery storage finally reached that tipping point in the US, where they were literally contributing electricity to the entire grid.

• 8:08Emily Kwong?

  Right. And you mentioned that earlier, that 2021 was the year there was this big jump, that battery storage capacity increased 230%.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Right, no, exactly.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  And that brings us to the situation today, where batteries are all over the economy, in cars, and mopeds, and buses, and trucks, to drive them around.

• 8:29Emily Kwong?

  I have chills. I mean, this was a great time. And it's kind of cool to hear that the legacy of my iPod served a greater purpose.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Never let it go. Yep, exactly. Now, you remember the battery I mentioned earlier?

• 8:41Emily Kwong?

  Oh, yeah, the cube battery that debuted in the 90s with the Sony camcorder?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  That's the one, yeah.

• 8:47Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  That was a game changer for battery storage, because it used lithium-ion technology, which was way more energy-dense than what we had, nickel-cadmium or lead-acid batteries.

• 8:58Emily Kwong?

  Energy-dense meaning?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Meaning lithium-ion batteries can hold a charge for longer. They're lighter, it can be recharged a lot more time, it's more energy-efficient.

• 9:06Emily Kwong?

  I've always wondered this. Is there anything specific to lithium that makes this possible? Like, why is this so special?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, for one, they're incredibly light compared to nickel or lead. It also gives up its electron really easily, which is important, given that a battery works when electrons flow from the negative electrode to the positive one.

• 9:24Emily Kwong?

  I've made enough lemon batteries to know this. Yes, the negative electrode is the anode, and it releases electrons. And the positive electrode is the cathode, and that absorbs the electrons. And when they are recharged, the electrons move back. It's like a cycle.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  We should just use lemons to power our grid. What are we doing?

• 9:45Emily Kwong?

  Right, yeah. So you're saying lithium-ion batteries are easily allowing this, like, electron transfer to happen?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Exactly. And as these batteries became more advanced, new types of lithium-ion batteries came about. So there's lithium-ion phosphate battery, for example, which is cheaper and less flammable than its precursors. It's also less energy-dense, but its low cost made that worthwhile. The batteries at Cal Flats, for example, are LFPs, this lithium-ion phosphate, and they can hold like four hours of energy.

• 10:18Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so that's where we're at today. These cabinets of lithium-ion phosphate batteries, LFPs, have become the standard for grid-scale battery storage, and it sounds like that technology is growing quickly.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the domino effect and an affordable, powerful chemistry for batteries have allowed this technology to grow exponentially.

• 10:42Emily Kwong?

  Is there any reason for this momentum behind battery sales to ever stop? Like, can we forever expect batteries to keep growing at this exponential rate?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Well, forever, I don't know, but analysts like Dan Wolter definitely see the dominoes continuing to fall for the foreseeable future. He sees battery storage advancing from cars and the grid to maybe even like freight ships, even planes.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  Five years ago, everyone would have called us crazy for saying electric aviation can be possible. Today, I think we're seeing some really interesting first signs that, you know, 20-seater electric planes that can fly most of the flights within the US, within Europe, and within China.

• 11:22Emily Kwong?

  That is wild.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  This plane, it's on an upward trajectory, and so is battery storage. It's really in that position to be disrupted further, and likely through new chemistries. For example, sodium-ion batteries are still a young technology, but they're projected to follow in the footsteps of LFP batteries.

• 11:39Emily Kwong?

  Oh, why is that?

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Sodium-ion batteries are even cheaper than LFPs, in part because they rely less on critical minerals, but also sodium's just kind of everywhere. It's literally 1,000 times more abundant than lithium, and these batteries don't perform as well as LFPs, but the market could say we'll take lower performance at that cost.

• 11:59Emily Kwong?

  Right, okay.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  The other benefit of sodium-ion batteries, they're less taxing on the environment. So sodium is so abundant, there's less pressure to dig deeper and deeper or into far-flung places of the world. They also don't rely on minerals like cobalt or nickel, which are both known for being super water intensive and having polluting mining processes.

• 12:19Emily Kwong?

  That's an exciting prospect, that these sodium-ion batteries might be a thing. Okay.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:24Emily Kwong?

  You mentioned earlier that most batteries used for grid-scale storage have but a four-hour capacity. What about batteries that can last longer?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  So there are some versions that can go for days, and one of those is the Redox Flow battery, which is currently used on a much smaller scale, but it could change the story from just four hours to daily or even multi-day capacity.

• 12:49Emily Kwong?

  That's amazing to imagine a battery that could last for days. How would that work? How does this Redox Flow battery work?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  It really would redefine how batteries are made. Inside each battery, there are two electrodes that we talked about, the cathode and the anode, and in between them, there's liquid. Whenever electrons move from one side to the other, there's an automatic discharge. And with the Redox Flow battery, those two sides are completely separate, so it can maintain a charge way better.

• 13:19Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, I can see that. So how batteries are made, they're changing chemistries, these are all reasons batteries have followed this upward trajectory. Cooper, I am located in DC. Are you telling me that if I turned on the lights someday, is there a chance that power could come from a battery?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  It's grown fast. By 2030, some forecasts have capacity increasing by like 400%, and it's already high. So all this, it's very exciting to Dan Wolter.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  So we all hear about like new AI breakthroughs every day, every sort of extra billion parameters on a new AI model everyone gets super excited about. But when we talk about batteries, there are huge breakthroughs happening that are changing our energy landscape and therefore our entire economy, and no one really seems to be paying attention to it.

• 14:07Emily Kwong?

  Well, we are definitely paying attention to it. Short Wave and The Indicator, thanks to you.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Thanks, Emily.

• 14:18Emily Kwong?

  Short Wave is the full battery series Cooper led for The Indicator is out now. We will link to the series in our show notes, in addition to a previous episode we did on long-term battery storage and batteries of the future. Check them out.

• 14:32Emily Kwong?

  This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Quacey Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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