Jaramillo: 100-hour lithium-ion storage cannot clear grid energy markets economically
Mateo Jaramillo · What do you do with a 100-hour battery? · Dec 14, 2023 · at 9:37
Mateo Jaramillo, CEO of Form Energy, explains why lithium-ion's modular cost structure makes it uneconomic for multi-day long-duration energy storage compared to 4-hour systems.
0:00 / 0:55exact quote · 55.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In the case of lithium ion, Let's say that's roughly a hundred dollars a kilowatt hour. You're adding a hundred dollars for every hour you want to discharge. And the industry normalizes around dollar per kilowatt in terms of comparative resources. So everything comes, comes back to that figure in the end. You know, sort of in the battery world, we like to talk about kilowatt hours, dollar cost per kilowatt hour, but the industry does not really do that. And so your cost comparisons are always on a dollar per kilowatt. And so, so then the question becomes, how many hours do I get for that cost per kilowatt? And for lithium ion today, that's roughly four hours. But if I need a hundred hours I'm not going to pay, you know, 25 times as much on a per kilowatt basis for that resource. It just doesn't clear in the market. It is not anywhere close to being a least cost alternative to provide that kind of function into the system.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mateo Jaramillo
Jaramillo: Displacing lithium-ion for intraday storage up to 12 hours is unlikely
“Displacing lithium ion is going to be really hard. I mean, the grid markets are sort of the tail on the dog of the automotive markets right now driving the production of lithium ion at scale. And so, so the industry that we're in, the electric industry gets to…”
Jaramillo: Grid storage value drops between 12 and 75 hours of duration
“What we find in the modeling is that there's a lot of value for sort of up to 10 or 12 hours, let's say. There is less value. I'm not going to put a specific number, but there's, there is less value that we see very markedly in the system until you get back up…”
Jaramillo: Grids will pay for 100-hour storage at $20 per kWh
“All the modeling that we did confirmed by third priority modeling is that a hundred hours and 20 dollars per kilowatt hour is sort of the magic combination. And if you can hit 20 dollars per kilowatt hour, the system will pay for a hundred hours of duration.”
Jaramillo: Multi-day storage halves the land footprint needed for solar buildout
“By having cost-effective multi-day storage, you can incorporate More renewable energy without sacrificing reliability at basically half, half the land cost, and that, by that I mean you only have to put solar on half as many acres to get the same benefit and t…”
Jaramillo: Iron-Air Raw Materials Cost Under $1/kWh vs $30–$35 for Lithium-Ion
“One quick point of reference, you know, lithium ion active materials. So you pull the active materials out of the ground, you put them on the table, it's maybe 30, 35 dollars a kilowatt hour, unprocessed, right? Not turned into a cell at all. For us, it's less…”