LDES systems integrate with renewable generation sites and can store energy for over 10 hours. e-Zinc’s battery is one example of a 12–100-hour duration solution, with capabilities including recapturing curtailed energy for time shifting, providing resilience when the grid goes down and addressing extended periods of peak demand to replace traditional peaking power plants and transmission and distribution infrastructure.
To understand how LDES can transform energy grids, it’s important to understand what the problem of energy storage looks like in practice.
Curtailment creates waste today, but is also a significant opportunity if we can conserve that energy for when we need it. The New York Independent System Operator, which monitors the reliability of the state’s power system and coordinates the daily operations to distribute electricity supply, saw 64 GWh of wind generated energy curtailed, wasted, in 2021. This is equivalent to powering 12,000 homes for an entire year. Meanwhile in California, the issue is magnitudes larger — 1.9 TWh of solar generated energy was curtailed in 2022; the equivalent of powering 200,000 homes for an entire year. The Southwest Power Pool, a considerably smaller market for renewable buildout, curtailed 7% of all wind generated energy (9 GWh) in 2022.
An LDES solution would have captured the excess energy generated during these otherwise curtailed periods, and shifted it to times of greater need — periods of intermittency, grid shut offs or periods of peak demand, for example to replace peaking power plants and transmission and distribution infrastructure.