DOE working with partners to accelerate long-duration energy storage

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) took a step forward this week toward accelerating the commercialization of long-duration energy storage (LDES).

The DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) partnered with the Edison Electric Institute’s (EEI’s) Institute for the Energy Transition, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and the Long Duration Energy Storage Council on a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to advance LDES.

While shorter-duration energy storage is currently being installed to support renewable energy generation, long-duration storage technologies are critical to help grid operators use stored energy to better manage seasonal fluctuations in demand. It plays an increasingly important role in ensuring continued grid stability and reliability.

“Long-duration energy storage represents an opportunity to fill critical gaps in the grid and serve as a foundational platform for clean energy to power our homes, businesses, and vehicles,” Vanessa Chan, the U.S. Department of Energy chief commercialization officer, and director of the Office of Technology Transitions, said. “I am thrilled to see this important partnership get off to the races to help meet our energy storage needs and secure our clean energy future.”

As part of the MOU, the partners will collaborate with long-duration energy storage experts on ways to expand the marketplace. Specifically, the memorandum of understanding seeks to support the development and domestic manufacture of energy storage technologies that can meet all U.S. market demands by 2030; facilitate the understanding and dissemination of knowledge about the technological, economic, and resilience benefits afforded by long-duration energy storage; provide access to specific DOE and national lab core competencies in energy storage and energy infrastructure integration for supporting research, development, demonstration, and deployment purposes; and convene regulators, electric companies, technology vendors, and the financial community to identify barriers to LDES deployment and potential solutions to those barriers.

“Long-duration energy storage is one of the key technologies that the newly launched Institute for the Energy Transition is designed to focus on because LDES can play a key role in the clean energy transition,” Edison Electric Institute President Tom Kuhn said. “It will take close coordination with our critical partners to accelerate the commercialization of LDES and to address the technical, economic, regulatory, and policy barriers to deployment.”

EPRI President and CEO Arshad Mansoor said the partnership will harness the collective strengths of leaders in industry, government, and R&D to accelerate the development and deployment of LDES technologies needed for the clean energy transition. “Strengthening U.S. electric grid reliability and resilience on the path to decarbonization rests on advancing energy storage to balance intermittent renewables,” he said.

Long Duration Energy Storage Council Executive Director Julia Souder agreed that long-duration energy storage is critical to meet local, regional and global net-zero decarbonization goals. “LDES complements rapid renewable growth by offering flexibility, reliability, affordability, and security. This partnership allows us to work together to accelerate the various markets and contracts even faster to deploy diverse LDES technologies,” Souder said.