< Key Hightlight >
Today, stationary energy storage usually means batteries or pumped hydro. They have environmental and scale-up issues from shortage of materials to shortage of sites. They poorly meet or fail completely with many of the emerging requirements, such as railway surges and seasonal storage of solar. That means a large market for alternatives.
Welcome the 195 page IDTechEx report, "Stationary Energy Storage Without Batteries: Grid, Microgrid, UPS, Trackside 2021-2041". Uniquely, it reveals how new battery-less stationary storage will surge to a $6.5 billion business in 2031, with much more beyond. Learn how compressing air or lifting weights can win for the developing market for massive seasonal storage of solar power but there are subsets and other options. Electric train systems taking over from diesel save 15% of their energy bill if 95% efficient supercapacitors grab train braking energy, then surge it into trains leaving. Batteries perform poorly for this, so they are being abandoned.
For electricity supply, see how there is scope for storing hydrogen for fuel cells, using flywheels, new lithium-ion supercapacitors, pseudocapacitors, thermal storage, liquifying or compressing air. These non-battery solutions, mostly with no precious metals, toxins or explosions are also compared and prospects appraised. Which are excellent and which are a poor investment for this? Many non-battery options are promised to reach half the levelized cost of storage of lithium-ion batteries, today's stationary-storage favourite. Which ones and can they be believed?
The report is commercially-oriented to serve all in the value chain by clarifying where the technology and demands are leading, the players and the gaps in the market. Good and bad: assessment not eulogy. It is researched and frequently updated by IDTechEx analysts worldwide, often at PhD level, and carrying out interviews in local languages. Many new infograms, pictures, diagrams, graphs and ongoing 2021 news items make it both easily readable and up-to-date.
Questions answered for grid, microgrid, UPS and trackside rail include:
- What is the full picture of emerging stationary-storage needs 2021-2041?
- What is the complete portfolio of non-battery options 2021-2041?
- What does the research pipeline tell us?
- What is the bad and good of these vs emerging batteries for stationary storage?
- Projected costs vary from low to high. Which, why, what prospective improvement?
- Why is there a place for technologies with a few minutes to effectively infinite storage time?
- What do combinations as "hybrid energy storage systems" achieve?
- What are the many gaps in the emerging market for smart city distributed storage?
- Who will emerge as leading players making billion-dollar new businesses out of all this?
- What companies will make ideal collaborators?
The Executive Summary and Conclusions section is sufficient for those with limited time, its many new infograms and tables comparing the options, technologies, achievements and opportunities with many roadmaps and forecasts to 2041. They even reveal the later-arriving challenges and opportunities. See some mainstream battery uses being challenged by later-emerging cleaner, better-performing, safer, more affordable options covered in the report.
The rest consists of the following topics, all including many actual examples in action or under trial:
2. Introduction - Understand ongoing battery problems leading to the adoption of alternatives for reasons of safety, performance, and cost. See the contestants for more affordable, better performing, safer and more environmental energy storage than batteries can provide. We introduce the electricity grid structure, the service which the grid requires and microgrids and give new storage examples from 2021.
3. Supercapacitors and derivatives - Technology, success, best practice and potential for pure, symmetrical EDLC and derivatives lithium-ion capacitors LIC and pseudocapacitors in banks 1kWh and above, including multipurpose backup/ peak shaving/ power factor correction etc. Manufacturers compared.
4. Gravitational Energy Storage - 35 packed pages because of its importance and variety including U-PHES ARGES, MGES etc. In the initial part, a chart of the energy provided by a mass of different size and falling from different heights is provided to give the reader a feeling of the size of the mass required. The subchapter concludes with an analysis of GES and its capability to reach the market.
5. Compressed Air Energy Storage - CAES Technical features, options, companies and future prospects.
6. Liquid Air Energy Storage - LAES technology, market and potential.
7. Thermal Energy Storage - TES technology, market and potential.
8. Company profiles - as links to IDTechEx database and detailed tables with critical appraisal.
StationaryUS$ 5,995