The world needs energy storage - and energy storage needs us.

This is a transcript of the Keynote Address delivered by Ken Boyce at the Energy Storage Systems Safety & Reliability Forum hosted at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on March 4, 2020.

Picture a dark night in sub Saharan Africa. The Southern Cross glitters among the stars in the sky above, and beneath there is a small cluster of homes. These homes are miles away from any electric grid and these people are like some of the 1.6 billion people in the world – about one in six - that do not have access to reliable electricity, or access to electricity at all. Yet this cluster of homes has electric lighting, as the children do reading homework and families end their day together in the light of their home. This is what energy storage can do.

Now let’s think about a blistering summer day in Southern California. Demand is high and increasing, and the grid is struggling. As industrial and commercial loads continue, people start to return home to increase residential demand, and solar production wanes, we are in the midst of the famous duck curve, and the grid starts to destabilize. But intelligent distributed energy resources and microgrids intervene to promote the health of the grid and carry it through the challenge. This is what energy storage can do.

A long way from Southern California, yet another of the increasing number of severe storms on our planet is thrashing the cities on a coast. Power lines are down, and electrical infrastructure swamped with seawater is out of commission. As the storm passes and night falls, much of the region is in darkness. Yet there are communities shining like beacons, with continued electrical supply for medical devices, critical loads, and helping people through the crisis. This is what energy storage can do.

Far away from the storm, on an island, electrical rates are demand-based and fluctuate. Progressive minded communities and people want to use greener energy and have more control over their energy expenses. They invest in rooftop solar, community solar, electric vehicles, and energy storage systems. these assets empower them to produce, store and use energy in ways aligned with their priorities and values, and provides them with more energy independence. This, too, is what energy storage can do.

Each of these scenarios demonstrates why our world simply must have energy storage. The stakes are high for it to be done right. The ability for storage to complement renewable energy technologies, provide additional resiliency to the grid, and empower energy consumers all make storage essential for our energy future. 

However, no technology deployment is ultimately sustainable unless it is safe and reliable. That’s why it’s such a pleasure to be here to speak with you as leaders of the energy storage safety community. We’ve been working hard on proactively addressing the safety of energy storage, and we have come together here at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to continue that important effort.

UL believes that innovation creates opportunity and challenge in equal measure. The advanced infrastructure of today and tomorrow demands responsible advances, intelligent connections, protected data and transparent information. Trust makes it go. By applying scientific leadership and data-driven insights, we help people reduce risk and realize greater quality, safety, security and sustainability.

This Energy Storage Systems Safety & Reliability Forum brings together like-minded leaders in the industry to talk about the important advancements that have been made, to share best practices that have been more fully developed, to unlock insights from research programs, and to discuss important work that needs to be done going forward.

To unlock the very real benefits of energy storage on a sustainable basis, it will be essential to advance science and engineering to proactively address how people think about energy storage. We need to make it easy for people to say “Yes!” to storage regarding policy, economics, decisioning, installation, approval and use. Supporting the “art of the possible” in terms of new energy storage applications, technologies and approaches falls to us as leaders from scientific institutions, the US National Laboratories, academia, research facilities, industry, and affected user groups.

As we know, there have been safety incidents involving energy storage around the world. These are really quite limited in terms of the growing energy storage fleet, but any incident has a very real human impact that we must recognize and address. These incidents provide essential field experience that helps us as the leaders to leverage technical insights and make the future better than the past. We must fully embrace the opportunity to learn from these incidents, and to leverage those learnings to the greatest degree in order to advance safety and reliability.

And I’m glad to say there is a tremendous amount of work that has been done and is underway to make that happen. Elbert Hubbard has said “The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.” The good news is, we are saying it can be done, and are in fact doing it.

How is that happening? Research continues to drive better understanding of vulnerabilities, decisioning about technologies, important topics like fire characterization, and how new, effective and safe approaches can be developed. Standards continue to promote diligent consideration and codification of the risks we will accept and those we agree must be mitigated, and provide a platform for responsible scaling with confidence. Codes continue to dynamically evolve to support safe and appropriate integration of energy storage into our built environment. National Laboratories continue to drive forward with both early stage and applied research efforts to inform the technical community. Industry groups have actively convened experts to define and establish best practices for energy storage systems. Training programs continue to educate those in the trades and others about energy storage systems and how to interact with them. And work continues to unfold to make sure we consider the best ways to arm our first responders with the information, tactics and approaches to keep them as safe as possible while they carry out their critical missions in a world that will have more and more energy storage.

Think of the entire human footprint of the built environment today. In the next 40 years, that will fully double. Some construction will replace what is in existence now, and that will be supplemented by a tremendous boom of new construction. Much of this new construction will be in different places around the world than we think of as today’s population centers, much of it in Africa and southern Asia. We must collectively undertake this transition with a view toward clean energy, storage, carbon reduction, and a sustainable built environment, for the people of the future.

Specifically related to energy storage, this will include leadership in addressing critical and unique issues in the dynamic expansion of energy storage across the residential, commercial and utility scale domains; working with key organizations and parties to proactively address safety of the technologies, integration into the infrastructure and emergency response preparedness; building out methods to objectively assess performance, reliability and durability to support educated decisions on financing, procurement, usage and maintenance; providing practical messaging to support navigation of the decisioning about different storage technologies; forward-looking guidance on navigating pricing dynamics; and managing the processes to support effective life cycle management as more energy systems are deployed, age and are decommissioned. As the storage industry itself matures, being able to provide scalable solutions that can be readily adopted will be increasingly important, and from my experience standards and codes are critical foundations and accelerators for that scaling.

We have a wide and deep group of collaborators working together to make this happen. Government; National Labs; manufacturers; grid authorities & utilities; code & standards organizations; industry alliances; testing and research institutions; academia; insurance, and others. You’ll hear from those people today and tomorrow. We all have a chance to listen, learn, challenge, collaborate, and use our individual, and collective, expertise to move forward. Together we need to find the important issues that require additional proactive attention; have open discussions about real risks and practical mitigation; think comprehensively about everyone that engages with energy storage technologies over their life, and make sure they can do so safely.

I was at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory PV Reliability Workshop just last week, presenting our research on photovoltaic module durability. As we know, photovoltaics really started being deployed in increasing amounts in the 1980’s and is the fastest growing part of the energy infrastructure today. We have decades of experience with PV, but there is still a rigorous and active set of work underway to continue to enhance our understanding of degradation mechanisms, extend life of the assets, reduce soft costs, improve financial decisioning, and support appropriate introduction of new materials and approaches. PV and energy storage are coupled in many ways, but it shows that our work is really just starting in the energy storage domain.

And technological disruptions will make our work more important. Fostering new solutions that result from convergence of different sectors, such as the automotive and infrastructure communities and the storage and solar communities, will be imperative to best find practical new energy system paradigms. Considering the needs of the entire value chain and stakeholder community – from consumers to finance to utilities to insurers to first responders and others – is essential. All these aspects of the energy future will require strong leadership to make sure that the decisions we make and the paths we choose offer the best holistic approach for energy storage. We must lead the way to recognize and secure the role of energy storage in establishing our optimum energy future.

Because the world needs energy storage to achieve imperatives for our planet and its people in building a better and cleaner energy infrastructure. And energy storage needs us – each of us – to continue this important work together. It’s up to us to make sure energy storage reaches its promise, and I think we are up to the challenge.