By Rich Heidorn Jr.

WASHINGTON — Assistant Energy Secretary Bruce Walker said Thursday that the Department of Energy is planning a megawatt-scale “Storage Launchpad” that he predicted will cut the cost of energy storage dramatically.

Walker told attendees of the NERC Reliability Summit that funding for the initiative, which will be assigned to one of DOE’s 17 National Laboratories, is included in President Trump’s proposed fiscal 2020 budget, which was released March 11.

“We are going to build a facility … where we can leverage our focus on chemistry. So we’re looking at aqueous, non-aqueous redox equation-type batteries, zinc manganese oxide,” Walker said. “We’ve made some significant breakthroughs already in that space. We believe we’re going to be able to drive the cost down to basically 20% of what it is today over the next five years.”

The budget proposes $5 million for the Storage Launchpad and $15 million “to accelerate the conversion of the National Wind Testing Facility site into an experimental microgrid capable of testing grid integration at the megawatt scale.” The budget would cut funding for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy by 70% and eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. Congress rejected similar proposals last year.

Daniel Gabaldon, director and co-founder of Enovation Partners, a Chicago-based consulting firm that does the data analysis for Lazard’s levelized cost of storage report, expressed some skepticism that a $5 million investment could produce such a dramatic return in battery technology but said DOE’s investment would be “a really healthy development.”

Although Enovation doesn’t track the technologies cited by Walker for Lazard, Gabaldon said the prediction of an 80% reduction is in line with claims of early-stage companies pursuing alternatives to lithium-ion technology.

“We’ve seen very dramatic claims, and it would be certainly helpful for the suppliers, as well as potential buyers, to substantiate those claims,” he said in an interview. “Whether it comes to pass, who knows?”

Gabaldon said federal funding is essential for early-stage technologies. The commercial success of lithium-ion batteries for short-duration uses is “sort of shading the forest floor [and denying light to] young shoots of new technologies that — given the right kind of support — could transcend what lithium-ion can do, especially for longer-duration applications, which in the long run will be really essential,” he said.

Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of the Energy Storage Association, said “securing an 80% cost reduction on precommercial storage technologies could be possible in the next five years.”

“Investing $5 million in this effort, while modest, is welcomed by ESA,” she said in a statement. “Any investment in the energy storage industry translates into direct job growth here in the United States.”

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s 2018 Outlook projects a 66% drop in lithium-ion battery pack prices by 2030, largely because of economies of scale.

Grid Resilience Model as a ‘Platform’

In other remarks, Walker told attendees of the NERC conference that DOE’s effort to develop a North American grid resilience model is progressing and that the department hopes to have a static model complete by October. DOE will then work with NERC, FERC, RTOs, DOE’s power marketing administrations and industry to transition it to a real-time model.

“We will continue [working] on this until such time that we’re able to make the real-time piece work and begin to automate the process with the critical infrastructure we’ve identified,” he said.

Walker said the model will be a “platform” on which DOE can test use of the research and development produced by the department’s National Labs.

One technology, he said, could leapfrog synchrophasors, which were introduced after the 2003 Northeast blackout. With sample rates of about 50 times a second, synchrophasors are too slow for “a system that’s as dynamically changing and integrating renewables and dealing with different levels of harmonics and transients like we’ve never seen in the past, with the threat vectors that we’re seeing,” Walker said.

He said the department is drawing on previously developed fiber optic sensing technologies, which sample about 1 million times a second. “We probably don’t need a million times a second, so what we’re going to try and figure out [is] exactly what we do need to be able to see the harmonics and transients that we’re actually seeing on the grid today.”

Walker also promoted the March 28 technical conference DOE and FERC are hosting “to discuss security practices to protect energy infrastructure.”

In January, Walker announced a $1 million Electricity Industry Technology and Practices Innovation Challenge seeking technologies to address vulnerabilities and threats, and mitigate energy sector interdependencies.

Walker said innovations in energy storage could change how the industry looks at reserve margins. “Reserve margins were put back when the system had fuel security and we anticipated two generators and two major transmission lines dropping off the system,” he said.

“That formula doesn’t work anymore because if I ever take out one of your [natural gas] pipelines, you’re going to lose thousands and thousands of megawatts of generation. And so, you’re automatically going to go into underfrequency load shed.

“We’ve got to do something about it. I know through our organization, which is very much focused on R&D, they look at me a little cross-eyed sometimes when I’m like, ‘We don’t have three years to solve this problem. We’ve got like three months.’”