As countries around the world continue to focus on strengthening their domestic energy security, one critical element stands in their way: reliable energy storage. Energy fuels economic growth, creates jobs, and enhances national security. But existing domestically-made energy products – including fuels, equipment, and technology – are not enough to secure a country’s energy future. Domestic energy systems cannot achieve resilience without infrastructure that guarantees affordable, reliable, and abundant energy. With supportive policies in place, we have an opportunity to showcase the capabilities of cleantech and secure long-term energy independence in one fell swoop.
As energy grids evolve around the world, so too does the need for significant domestic energy storage. With increasing reliance on renewable sources like wind and solar, along with transmission and pipeline constraints for distribution, every community needs more than just a few hours of backup power to build and maintain a resilient energy grid. Long duration energy storage (LDES) solutions that can support the grid for eight hours or more are critical to ensuring stability when existing resources are variable or constrained. Any country can now tangibly secure its own energy resilience and independence, but only if political and financial leaders invest domestically in proven and innovative solutions like LDES.
Current storage technologies, like lithium-ion batteries, face challenges. Batteries rely on rare earth minerals with mining and refining supply chains stretching across the globe, inherently vulnerable and dependent on complicated supply chains for their production. Meanwhile, pumped hydro, which makes up a large portion of existing long duration storage, is constrained by limited suitable sites that require vast amounts of land and water. Fortunately, there are emerging technologies that promise a better, more sustainable solution – and they can be built with existing supply chains and workers.
Electricity demand is skyrocketing around the globe, driven by everything from electric vehicles to data centers and the electrification of homes. While solar and wind energy are abundant and affordable, we still face the challenge of intermittency – the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. We also can’t rely entirely on natural gas, which is vulnerable to geopolitical volatility and price fluctuations. But pairing domestically-made long duration energy storage with these resources can unlock a new era of energy security, reliability, and abundance. A-CAES is designed to meet these challenges on a massive scale and can be built across the majority of the world, creating thousands of domestic jobs and securing energy independence for generations to come.
As we look ahead to the next four years, we also must consider what comes after – the next 100 years. There is a rare opportunity to lead the world in energy storage innovation. Hydrostor’s commitment to domestically-made, long duration energy storage is a step in the right direction, providing reliable, resilient power to fuel the economy, create jobs, and protect our collective energy future.