The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) released its latest findings this month as part of its multi-year Storage Futures Study. The 45-page report, NREL’s sixth in this series, is filled with surprisingly good news. According to the agency’s modeling of high storage scenarios, solar could meet the country’s energy needs by 2050. The NREL modeled five different scenarios, ranging from a reference scenario that “follows all reference assumptions for cost and technology evolution through 2050” to a Zero Carbon scenario that heavily relies on storage but also shows the U.S. energy grid emitting no carbon whatsoever by 2050, with emissions slashed 95% by 2035. The Zero Carbon scenario proved surprisingly robust compared with other scenarios, such as a future in which natural gas costs are high but battery costs are low.
The Zero Carbon scenario proposes a world in which gas-fired generation is eliminated and daily storage instead does the job of providing ‘round-the-clock power generation, factoring in storage options that exceed the four-hour capacity of the most commonly used storage technologies from today, such as eight-hour and 10-hour batteries. A prior report put forth the estimate that storage could increase fivefold by 2050 to 125 GW or more. The latest study from NREL puts that number even higher at between 213 GW to 932 GW, depending on the scenario. The U.S. certainly appears to be heading in the right direction when it comes to storage. According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. could have 10 times its 2019 amount of 1,650 MW of battery storage installed by 2024, putting the capacity at 16.5 GW.
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Solar panels and battery storage are the future of how the U.S. gets its power
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