Safety, costs and regulatory controls could give the advanced lead battery market the opportunity to increase its share in the distributed energy storage system market.
Ray Kubis, chairman of Gridtential Energy, told BEST one of the largest opportunities developing for lead batteries is in distributed energy storage applications linked to renewable generation, especially solar.
His comments compliment those made at the BCI ‘virtual conference’ when he suggested most advanced lead batteries— EFB, AGM and bi-polar— could find market opportunities across the transportation industry, especially bi-polar in 48V applications.
Kubis told BEST: “One of the largest opportunities developing for advanced lead batteries is the distributed energy storage application linked to renewable generation especially solar both in commercial/industrial applications under 100kWhs and residential applications.
“Lithium is supplying the very large utility linked systems, yet safety and regulatory controls and system costs have a huge influence in these systems, and it is a big opportunity already in many markets across the world, and progressing in the US, especially in California and the Northeast US.”
The prediction follows industry analysts Navigant Research forecasting lithium-ion is set to account for 85% of future ESS projects as developers take advantage of deployment mandates and falling technology costs.
The US Department of Energy goal of $100/kWh is forecast to be met in 2023, according to industry analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). Although this was a pre-COVID-19 prediction.
Last year BNEF reported that despite prices falling 87% in real terms from 2010, lithium-ion batteries cost $156/kWh last year.
The US energy storage market is expected to grow from an annual deployment of 523MW ($712 million) last year to 7.3GW in 2025 ($7.2 billion), according to the U.S. Energy Storage Association (ESA) and Wood Mackenzie, Q4 2019 report.
