Energy Department Targets Vastly Cheaper Batteries to Clean Up the Grid

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/climate/renewable-energy-batteries.html

Source: By Brad Plumer, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: WASHINGTON — The Energy Department on Wednesday announced a new effort to tackle one of the toughest technical challenges facing President Biden’s push for an electric grid dominated by solar and wind power — namely, what to do when the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing. The government is chasing a promising but uncertain solution: a low-cost way to store electricity generated by the sun or wind for hours, days or even weeks at a time, saving it for when it’s most needed. ...While dozens of companies are working on different ideas for so-called “long-duration energy storage,” most are still too expensive to be useful. As part of its initiative, the Energy Department wants to drive down the cost of long-duration storage 90 percent below the cost of today’s lithium-ion batteries by 2030. ...The announcement is part of the agency’s Energy Earthshots Initiative, which aims to accelerate the deployment of nascent technologies to fight climate change. The program is an acknowledgment that the United States has not yet fully developed all the technologies it needs to meet Mr. Biden’s goal of zeroing out the nation’s planet warming emissions by 2050....

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