Cheap batteries will revolutionise the renewable energy market
The big power companies will struggle to keep up as a solution emerges to the problem of storing wind and solar power
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, posing with with a Tesla elecric car in Times Square. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP
News this week, from opposite ends of the planet, that points to the convulsion of change about to hit the global economy. The first report came from Palo Alto, California, headquarters of the Tesla electric car company. Tesla's car produces no carbon emissions (so long as the electricity that charges its batteries is also low carbon). Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, announced it would invest in a $4bn-$5bn"gigafactory" doubling the world's production of lithium-ion batteries. These power your mobile phone, but also Tesla's high-end luxury electric cars. The objective is to cut battery prices by 30% in three years, and to halve them by 2020.
Since battery cost is the main obstacle to electric cars, this is potentially game-changing. It would allow electric cars with a 200-mile range to compete with the Ford Mondeo and not just the BMW 5-series (Tesla has already spurred the Bavarian luxury car-maker into an electric response).
Tesla is treading the route first mapped by Henry Ford, whose mass production of the Model T halved the price of US cars. The same happened with computer memory and, more recently, solar panels, whose price collapsed by half in just over a year.
Nor is scale the only likely development in batteries. There is work going on in nanotechnology, making things tiny. This allows a much greater surface within a given size of battery, so that charging will be quicker, and storage capacity higher. If scale and technology work their miracles, cheap batteries will disrupt many more industries than cars.
Most fundamentally, it will make the transition to low-carbon electricity far easier. Renewables like solar and onshore wind are coming down dramatically in price – the industry forecasts they will be cheaper than grid electricity in most of the world by 2025 – but they have a key disadvantage: they do not produce electricity when people want it.
This matters. The UK is typical in having an enormous variation in electricity use through the day, with demand when the kettles go on in the Coronation Street ads nearly double that in the early morning. Wind and solar cannot meet this without a cheap and effective battery solution.
Car batteries can be used to store and then provide electricity when demand peaks. And battery packs in the loft could charge up when the sun shines and the wind blows, and then supply heat, light and boiling water on winter evenings. Tesla's battery plant brings that prospect far closer.
Hot on the heels of Tesla's news, there is a report from Essen in Germany, a Ruhrland town at the heart of the last industrial revolution. It is where RWE – one of Europe's biggest power utilities and owner of the UK's npower – this week announced an annual loss of €2.76bn, its first since 1949.
Until now, power utilities have been regarded as among the safest of blue chip stocks. No longer. RWE's loss followed a record loss posted by one of the world's biggest electricity generators, France's GDF Suez. The change, as RWE made clear, was due to its failure to move quickly enough into renewables, which are causing massive changes to the German electricity grid.
Because solar and wind have no fuel costs, and you pay for the capital cost up front, their electricity is pumped into the grid regardless of price. With nearly a quarter of German electricity coming from renewables last year, the wholesale price of electricity can collapse on sunny, windy days. Sometimes power companies have to pay to deliver electricity to the grid. Since you cannot quickly shut down power stations this has cost the German utilities dear.
Germany is the augury of a future all power companies are likely to face – before a Tesla-style battery solution that could make their present problems look footling. Hardly a business or consumer has yet put a battery pack in the loft. But when they are cheap enough to warrant that, what price pylons and power stations? What price big power? What price Russian gas and Putin's leverage over Europe?
Disruptive change is a constant feature of capitalism. Railways ran coaching inns out of business. Electricity did for gas lighting, which had replaced oil lights, which replaced whale oil. The economist Joseph Schumpeter called it "creative destruction". We are on the crest of another technological tsunami.
The good news is that this wave will make the planet safer, and our children's future more secure.
No comments:
Post a Comment