The transition to a carbon-free electric power system is somewhat dependent on technology that’s not been built yet. Michigan is just taking its first incremental steps into the clean energy future.
You’ve probably heard this line before about solar and wind energy: The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.
So when the sun shines and the wind blows and energy is being generated, we need a way to store it for later. Right now, we’re using what we know: batteries.
“Today, if you supply power with a combination of wind, solar, and batteries at scale for utility supply, that is roughly competitive on cost with natural gas and is radically cheaper than nuclear or coal,” said Douglas Jester. He’s a managing partner at 5 Lakes Energy. He specializes in economic analysis and modeling for energy policy.
We’re going to need a lot of batteries. But the kind of batteries we have now will only provide four hour’s-worth of power, and those lithium-ion batteries will eventually wear out and the cost of disposing of them won’t be cheap.
“Batteries are nasty chemical devices that wear out after about 10 years, create enormous environmental damage in mining the materials to produce batteries, and create enormous environmental damage when they're dumped into landfills 10 years later,” said Ian Hiskens, Professor Emeritus in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan.
Michigan already stores energy
There is a different way to store energy. Since the 1970s, power companies in Michigan have been using mechanical storage of power, a pumped hydro facility.
I went to visit the facility recently. It’s near Ludington, on Lake Michigan. Consumers Energy and DTE Energy both use it. Consumers reports the Ludington Pumped Storage Plant can power a city with a population of approximately 1.4 million people for about eight hours.
At night, when demand for power is low, water is pumped from Lake Michigan far uphill to a huge reservoir. When demand for power is high, the water is released and it turns several large turbines below and they generate electricity.
Ian Hiskens said, in theory, that could work well with solar power.
“During the middle of the day, there's a lot of solar power available. It's pumping water uphill. And then in the late afternoon, sun's going down, load’s building up, then that water is being run downhill to produce. And so that works really well with hydro.”
But, it’s likely many people would oppose such a massive project along Great Lakes shores these days. It seems no one in Michigan is seriously considering building another pumped storage facility.
As for the problems with the current batteries that Ian Hiskens thinks are not a great solution, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) is thinking about that.
$5 million for figuring out how to deal with dead batteries
“And the thing that we're asking right now, is if a battery has a lifespan if 10 years, right? We've got 10 years-ish to work on that problem so that we can have that solution,” said Julie Staveland, Assistant Division Director for the Materials Management Division of EGLE.
The State of Michigan has approved $5 million dollars for researchers at Lawrence Tech University, University of Michigan, and Michigan State University to work on the problem. Staveland said they’re all looking at different elements of battery recycling.
“Basically, asking our universities within the state, 'Hey, we know that this is going to be an issue. How do we recycle the material from these batteries and then put that back into the economy, put that into products and how can we recapture that critical materials?' ”
At the University of Michigan, Michael Craig, Assistant Professor in Energy Systems, said they are developing battery technologies that can store more power and last longer. One idea is electrochemical flow batteries that can store ten to twenty hours of power.
“So, it can move larger and larger volumes of energy cheaper and cheaper. And that will serve its place. And then eventually we get to something that's even longer like hydrogen, for instance, which can do hundreds or thousands of hours cheaper and cheaper,” he said.
Hydrogen storage would likely require underground cavern storage (as the U.S. does with helium and natural gas) to store that kind of energy.
How and when those things align with the clean energy transition depends a lot on how quickly the technology is fully developed and, Craig said, importantly, how soon a supply chain can be established to manufacture those new storage systems.
That needs to happen sooner rather than later to reach net-zero carbon electricity generation at a level capable of handling the power demand.
