Before You Watch

This ~22-minute webinar is part of the Pathways to Commercial Liftoff initiative which is a Department of Energy-wide effort to strengthen engagement between the public and private sectors to accelerate the commercialization and deployment of key clean energy technologies. This Liftoff Webinar provides the private sector and other industry partners highlights of the report that include valuable, engagement-driven resources on how and when Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) can reach full scale deployment. This webinar features senior DOE leaders as they discuss the Pathways for Long Duration Energy Storage Liftoff Report and how long duration energy storage has a critical role to play in the clean energy transition.

Before you watch, it is useful to get familiar with the following definitions:

Duration of discharge or nominal duration refers to the specified or intended period of time that an energy storage system can continuously deliver its rated power output without being recharged or refueled. It is a crucial parameter that defines the system's capability to provide power at its full capacity over a certain duration. For example, if an energy storage system has a nominal duration of 4 hours, it means that it can sustain its rated power output continuously for 4 hours before depleting its stored energy to the point where it needs to be recharged or refueled.
DOE wants to establish a common language when it comes to market segmentation according to discharge duration as follows:
- Short duration: discharge durations of up to 10 hours
- Interday LDES: discharge durations of 10-36 hours
- Multiday/week LDES: discharge durations of 36-160 hours
- Seasonal shifting: dicharge durations beyond 160 hours

Required Webinar

Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Long-Duration Energy Storage
- The video has a long 21-minute introduction (please feel free to skip) and only watch the highlights on the report corresponding to minutes 21 to ~43.
- Liftoff Report: 20230320-Liftoff-LDES-vPUB.pdf
- Webinar slides: LDES-Pathway-to-Commercial-Liftoff_Public-Webinar Slides.pdf

Key Takeaways

Long Duration Energy Storage covers the set of technologies which can provide ~10 to ~160 hours of duration of dispatch in a power context. The report defines and focuses on two market segments: Inter-day LDES (10-36 hours) and Multi-day LDES (36-160+ hours).
The availability of cost-effective LDES technologies is an option to enable high renewable pathways and grid resilience, reduce the need for new natural gas buildout for reliability, and enhance energy independence by diversifying domestic energy storage supply chains. As a result, a net-zero US power grid could include ~460 GW of LDES by 2050. However, there are multiple technologies competing with LDES, so LDES will need market interventions to win and scale, but pathways that leverage LDES are projected to deliver ~$10-20B in annual savings by 2050.
LDES technologies require public and private investment to drive down cost and market intervention to compensate differentiated performance for the technology to scale to an industrial level in a net-zero world – this liftoff requires three key areas of action:
- Technology cost / performance improvement via grid-scale demonstration projects, starting immediately with the most near-term applications, to achieve competitive cost and operational performance (45-55% capital cost reduction and 7-15% RTE improvement from today).
- Market and regulatory evolution to provide market compensation for LDES services of at least $75 / KW-year is required to enable LDES deployments, at both the state-level (e.g., longer IRP horizons, LDES procurement carveouts) and ISO-level (e.g., expanded capacity / resource adequacy markets).
- Flexible and rapid supply chain formation (expanding to $330B by 2050 and 10-15 GW of annual deployment by 2035) will be needed in collaboration with industry and local players to avoid deployment bottlenecks ahead of a potential surge in demand.