Solar Energy

Power when the sun doesn’t shine

Published

1 year ago

March 14, 2024

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Power when the sun doesn’t shine

by Deborah Halber | MIT Energy Initiative

Boston MA (SPX) Mar 04, 2024

In 2016, at the huge Houston energy conference CERAWeek, MIT materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang found himself talking to a Tesla executive about a thorny problem: how to store the output of solar panels and wind turbines for long durations.

Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Mateo Jaramillo, a vice president at Tesla, knew that utilities lacked a cost-effective way to store renewable energy to cover peak levels of demand and to bridge the gaps during windless and cloudy days. They also knew that the scarcity of raw materials used in conventional energy storage devices needed to be addressed if renewables were ever going to displace fossil fuels on the grid at scale.

Energy storage technologies can facilitate access to renewable energy sources, boost the stability and reliability of power grids, and ultimately accelerate grid decarbonization. The global market for these systems – essentially large batteries – is expected to grow tremendously in the coming years. A study by the nonprofit LDES (Long Duration Energy Storage) Council pegs the long-duration energy storage market at between 80 and 140 terawatt-hours by 2040. “That’s a really big number,” Chiang notes. “Every 10 people on the planet will need access to the equivalent of one EV [electric vehicle] battery to support their energy needs.”

In 2017, one year after they met in Houston, Chiang and Jaramillo joined forces to co-found Form Energy in Somerville, Massachusetts, with MIT graduates Marco Ferrara SM ’06, PhD ’08 and William Woodford PhD ’13, and energy storage veteran Ted Wiley.

“There is a burgeoning market for electrical energy storage because we want to achieve decarbonization as fast and as cost-effectively as possible,” says Ferrara, Form’s senior vice president in charge of software and analytics.

Investors agreed. Over the next six years, Form Energy would raise more than $800 million in venture capital.

Bridging gaps

The simplest battery consists of an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte. During discharge, with the help of the electrolyte, electrons flow from the negative anode to the positive cathode. During charge, external voltage reverses the process. The anode becomes the positive terminal, the cathode becomes the negative terminal, and electrons move back to where they started. Materials used for the anode, cathode, and electrolyte determine the battery’s weight, power, and cost “entitlement,” which is the total cost at the component level.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the use of lithium revolutionized batteries, making them smaller, lighter, and able to hold a charge for longer. The storage devices Form Energy has devised are rechargeable batteries based on iron, which has several advantages over lithium. A big one is cost.

Chiang once declared to the MIT Club of Northern California, “I love lithium-ion.” Two of the four MIT spinoffs Chiang founded center on innovative lithium-ion batteries. But at hundreds of dollars a kilowatt-hour (kWh) and with a storage capacity typically measured in hours, lithium-ion was ill-suited for the use he now had in mind.

The approach Chiang envisioned had to be cost-effective enough to boost the attractiveness of renewables. Making solar and wind energy reliable enough for millions of customers meant storing it long enough to fill the gaps created by extreme weather conditions, grid outages, and when there is a lull in the wind or a few days of clouds.

To be competitive with legacy power plants, Chiang’s method had to come in at around $20 per kilowatt-hour of stored energy – one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion battery storage.

But how to transition from expensive batteries that store and discharge over a couple of hours to some as-yet-undefined, cheap, longer-duration technology?

“One big ball of iron”

That’s where Ferrara comes in. Ferrara has a PhD in nuclear engineering from MIT and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of L’Aquila in his native Italy. In 2017, as a research affiliate at the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, he worked with Chiang to model the grid’s need to manage renewables’ intermittency.

How intermittent depends on where you are. In the United States, for instance, there’s the windy Great Plains; the sun-drenched, relatively low-wind deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada; and the often-cloudy Pacific Northwest.

Ferrara, in collaboration with Professor Jessika Trancik of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and her MIT team, modeled four representative locations in the United States and concluded that energy storage with capacity costs below roughly $20/kWh and discharge durations of multiple days would allow a wind-solar mix to provide cost-competitive, firm electricity in resource-abundant locations.

Now that they had a time frame, they turned their attention to materials. At the price point Form Energy was aiming for, lithium was out of the question. Chiang looked at plentiful and cheap sulfur. But a sulfur, sodium, water, and air battery had technical challenges.

Thomas Edison once used iron as an electrode, and iron-air batteries were first studied in the 1960s. They were too heavy to make good transportation batteries. But this time, Chiang and team were looking at a battery that sat on the ground, so weight didn’t matter. Their priorities were cost and availability.

“Iron is produced, mined, and processed on every continent,” Chiang says. “The Earth is one big ball of iron. We wouldn’t ever have to worry about even the most ambitious projections of how much storage that the world might use by mid-century.” If Form ever moves into the residential market, “it’ll be the safest battery you’ve ever parked at your house,” Chiang laughs. “Just iron, air, and water.”

Scientists call it reversible rusting. While discharging, the battery takes in oxygen and converts iron to rust. Applying an electrical current converts the rusty pellets back to iron, and the battery “breathes out” oxygen as it charges. “In chemical terms, you have iron, and it becomes iron hydroxide,” Chiang says. “That means electrons were extracted. You get those electrons to go through the external circuit, and now you have a battery.”

Form Energy’s battery modules are approximately the size of a washer-and-dryer unit. They are stacked in 40-foot containers, and several containers are electrically connected with power conversion systems to build storage plants that can cover several acres.

The right place at the right time

The modules don’t look or act like anything utilities have contracted for before.

That’s one of Form’s key challenges. “There is not widespread knowledge of needing these new tools for decarbonized grids,” Ferrara says. “That’s not the way utilities have typically planned. They’re looking at all the tools in the toolkit that exist today, which may not contemplate a multi-day energy storage asset.”

Form Energy’s customers are largely traditional power companies seeking to expand their portfolios of renewable electricity. Some are in the process of decommissioning coal plants and shifting to renewables.

Ferrara’s research pinpointing the need for very low-cost multi-day storage provides key data for power suppliers seeking to determine the most cost-effective way to integrate more renewable energy.

Using the same modeling techniques, Ferrara and team show potential customers how the technology fits in with their existing system, how it competes with other technologies, and how, in some cases, it can operate synergistically with other storage technologies.

“They may need a portfolio of storage technologies to fully balance renewables on different timescales of intermittency,” he says. But other than the technology developed at Form, “there isn’t much out there, certainly not within the cost entitlement of what we’re bringing to market.” Thanks to Chiang and Jaramillo’s chance encounter in Houston, Form has a several-year lead on other companies working to address this challenge.

In June 2023, Form Energy closed its biggest deal to date for a single project: Georgia Power’s order for a 15-megawatt/1,500-megawatt-hour system. That order brings Form’s total amount of energy storage under contracts with utility customers to 40 megawatts/4 gigawatt-hours. To meet the demand, Form is building a new commercial-scale battery manufacturing facility in West Virginia.

The fact that Form Energy is creating jobs in an area that lost more than 10,000 steel jobs over the past decade is not lost on Chiang. “And these new jobs are in clean tech. It’s super exciting to me personally to be doing something that benefits communities outside of our traditional technology centers.

“This is the right time for so many reasons,” Chiang says. He says he and his Form Energy co-founders feel “tremendous urgency to get these batteries out into the world.”

Research Report:This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative.

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Solar Energy

Vietnam ups wind, solar targets as energy demand soars

Published

2 days ago

April 20, 2025

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Vietnam ups wind, solar targets as energy demand soars

by AFP Staff Writers

Hanoi (AFP) April 17, 2025

Vietnam has dramatically increased its wind and solar targets as it looks to up its energy production by 2030 to meet soaring demand, according to a revised version of its national power plan.

The Southeast Asian country has committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and the latest edition of its Power Development Plan 8 (PDP8), as it is known, maps out how it will reach those goals.

The manufacturing powerhouse has been heavily reliant on coal to meet its rapidly expanding energy needs. But now it wants to “strongly develop renewable energy sources”, according to the plan, which was published Wednesday on the government’s news portal.

With targets set at 73 gigawatts (GW) for solar and 38 GW for onshore wind energy by 2030 — and a significant increase to 296 GW and 230 GW by 2050 — the plan looks “really ambitious”, said Andri Prasetiyo, senior researcher at Senik Centre Asia.

The 2023 version of the PDP8 aimed for 12.8 GW for solar and 21 GW for wind by the end of the decade.

“I think this sends a clear message, Vietnam is positioning itself to maintain leadership in Southeast Asia’s clean energy transition, (even) taking a more prominent role in the region,” he told AFP.

Solar power grew rapidly in Vietnam until 2020 but its success hit a roadblock due to infrastructure limitations.

Prasetiyo said Vietnam’s new targets were “increasingly feasible”, although they far outstrip market projections of what the country can achieve.

– Coal, nuclear –

The latest version of the PDP8, which was approved this week, also re-emphasises the country’s 2023 pledge to end the use of coal by 2050.

Coal will represent nearly 17 percent of its energy mix by the end of the decade, down from a target of 20 percent set in 2023.

Meanwhile, solar will account for 31 percent of the country’s energy by 2030, while onshore wind will be 16 percent.

More than $136 billion will be needed if Vietnam is to get there, the document said.

Under the new plan, the country also aims to open its first nuclear power plant by 2035 at the latest.

It comes after Vietnam and Russia signed an agreement on nuclear energy in January, with Hanoi saying Russian nuclear giant Rosatom was “very interested” in cooperating on a project in central Ninh Thuan province.

Overall, as Vietnam targets an ambitious 10 percent economic growth rate by the end of the decade, it wants to raise its total installed capacity to a maximum of 236 GW by that date.

That’s up by more than 80 GW from the figure outlined in 2023.

Hanoi is also eager to avoid a repeat of the rolling blackouts and sudden power outages in summer 2023 that led to losses among manufacturers. They also prompted massive disruption for residents, as intensely hot weather and unprecedented drought strained energy supplies in northern Vietnam.

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Solar Energy

New system offers early warning of dust storms to protect solar power output

Published

6 days ago

April 16, 2025

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New system offers early warning of dust storms to protect solar power output

by Simon Mansfield

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Apr 10, 2025

A new predictive platform called iDust is poised to transform dust storm forecasting and improve solar energy output in dust-prone regions. Developed by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, iDust offers high-resolution, fast-turnaround dust forecasts that could help mitigate power losses across solar farms, particularly in arid zones.

The tool was created under the leadership of Dr. Chen Xi from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and detailed in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES).

“Dust storms not only block sunlight but also accumulate on solar panels, decreasing their power output.” said Chen, outlining the motivation behind the project. With China’s rapid expansion of solar installations in desert areas, the need for precise and timely dust forecasts has become increasingly urgent to avoid operational disruptions and revenue shortfalls.

Traditional systems like those from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) often lack the spatial resolution and processing speed needed for optimal solar planning. iDust addresses these limitations by embedding dust-related dynamics directly into its forecast engine. This allows the system to generate forecasts with 10-kilometer resolution-a fourfold improvement over previous models-while maintaining near-parity in computational load. Crucially, iDust can deliver 10-day forecasts within six hours of initial observations.

The effectiveness of iDust was put to the test on April 13, 2024, when it successfully tracked a severe dust storm over Bayannur in northern China. Such storms can distort solar energy projections by as much as 25% if unaccounted for, underscoring the value of integrating dust modeling into energy planning.

Designed for practical deployment, iDust aims to assist solar facility operators and grid managers in optimizing power production and reducing losses due to airborne particulates. As China pushes toward its carbon neutrality goals, innovations like iDust will be central to achieving sustainable energy reliability.

Researchers plan to expand the system for global application, allowing other countries with desert-based solar assets to benefit from enhanced dust forecasting.

Research Report:The Efficient Integration of Dust and Numerical Weather Prediction for Renewable Energy Applications

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Solar Energy

Solar park boom threatens Spain’s centuries-old olive trees

Published

7 days ago

April 15, 2025

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Solar park boom threatens Spain’s centuries-old olive trees

By Rosa SULLEIRO

Lopera, Spain (AFP) April 14, 2025

At his farm in southern Spain, Francisco Campos looked worriedly at a green sea of centuries-old olive trees that he fears will face the axe to make way for a proposed solar park.

“Cutting down olive trees to install solar panels is a crime,” the 64-year-old farmer told AFP in Lopera, a town of whitewashed buildings with 3,600 residents in the sunny southern region of Andalusia, Spain’s olive-growing heartland.

Spain is the world’s top producer of olive oil, but the fertile agricultural land long used by olive producers is now in high demand from power firms looking to install solar farms.

And with nearly 3,000 hours of sunshine per year, Andalusia is one of the Spanish regions with the highest number of solar panels as a renewables boom makes the country a European leader in green energy.

Renewable energy firms such as Greenalia and FRV Arroyadas have requested permission to build multiple solar farms near Lopera, which farmers say will affect up to 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of property.

The businesses negotiated agreements to lease the bulk of the land required for their projects but encountered significant opposition from hundreds of small landowners.

This prompted the regional government of Andalusia to announce it will expropriate some land needed for the plants, declaring them to be in “the public interest”.

“Is it in the public interest for them to take my land and give it to a company so that the company can profit? This has no benefit for us,” said Campos.

“Our way of life is going to be destroyed,” he added.

– ‘From our ancestors’ –

Campaigners predict that the eight solar projects planned for the area will require the removal of nearly 100,000 olive trees.

The regional government puts the figure significantly lower, at 13,000.

Local residents anticipated power companies would seek to install solar panels in the area, but they never imagined “they would come and take away your property,” said Rafael Alcala, a spokesman for a platform that represents the solar plants’ opponents.

In support of landowners impacted by the latest round of expropriations, dozens of farmers on tractors — some holding signs that read “We don’t want solar plants” — gathered on a recent morning outside Lopera.

“These lands come from our ancestors. What am I going to leave to my children now?” Maria Josefa Palomo, a 67-year-old pensioner, said at the protest.

Losing 500 hectares of olive groves would wipe out more than two million euros ($2.3 million) in annual revenues, according to local olive oil cooperative La Loperana.

Campaigners say 5,000 olive trees have already been uprooted from land belonging to a farmer in Lopera who signed an agreement with one of the firms behind a solar park. More could follow.

In an effort to stop the projects, opponents have filed lawsuits against the regional government and the companies involved.

– ‘Until the end’ –

Spain generated a record 56.8 percent of its electricity last year from renewable sources such as wind and solar, according to grid operator Red Electrica.

Leveraging on its sunny plains, windy hillsides and fast-flowing rivers, Spain intends to raise the share of renewable-generated electricity to 81 percent of the total by 2030 as part of efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

The regional government has defended the renewables projects, saying less than one percent of the land they use in the region had to be expropriated from reluctant landowners.

Spanish solar industry group UNEF, which represents more than 800 companies, says the projects boost tax revenues in rural communities.

They generate “significant amounts” that can be used to improve public services, said UNEF head Jose Donoso.

Solar park opponents in Lopera disagree and vow to continue their fight.

“Until the end. Nobody is going to take what is ours away from us,” said Juan Cantera, a 28-year-old farmer.

“Olive oil is everything in Lopera”.

rs/ds/imm/gv/tym

RED ELECTRICA CORPORACION

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