Robinson Meyer

Battery Storage’s Next Bottleneck Is Market Design

Battery storage has become practical grid infrastructure, but its further expansion will depend less on cell costs than on whether power markets and regulators pay for the capacity, congestion relief and reliability it provides, said Jupiter Power’s Jack Godshall. Falling costs have made storage deployable, but scaling it requires systems that can value its services, supply equipment affordably and operate a growing fleet. Chibueze Amanchukwu of the University of Chicago argued that sodium-ion and other earth-abundant chemistries illustrate the trade-off: they could lower costs, improve safety and reduce supply-chain dependence, but must compete with increasingly cheap lithium-ion.