According to a new report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, high cost and material availability are the main non-technical barriers to large-scale deployment of energy storage. This report titled "Non technical Barriers to Battery Deployment in the United States" explores why this situation occurs and what measures the industry can take to alleviate these barriers and ensure the deployment of sufficient energy storage assets.

Author Kara E. Rodby wrote that unlike other battery markets such as consumer electronics or electric vehicles, grid scale applications require much lower cost solutions to compete with existing fossil fuel power generation assets. Although the cost of lithium-ion batteries has decreased to be suitable for such applications in the past 30 years, new battery technologies such as vanadium flow batteries (VFRB) or metal air batteries (MAB) need to be deployed extensively to achieve long-term energy storage goals. Although these new technologies have long-term cost advantages over lithium-ion technology due to open architecture (both) or decoupling of power and energy components (VRFB), the current initial installation cost is still prohibitively high.

Rodby wrote that part of the reason is insufficient demand from the power grid for long-term energy storage solutions. Another fact is that these technologies are only suitable for fixed energy storage applications on a large grid scale, and therefore have not benefited from "beachhead markets" such as electric vehicles, thereby reducing costs. Can commercial companies alone reduce costs sufficiently low when demand truly arrives? Government intervention may be crucial for achieving this goal. The Global Long Term Energy Storage Committee, established at the end of last year, recently developed a roadmap for what governments can do and how long they may need to do it to address this issue.

Currently, one thing small long-term energy storage companies can do is to utilize the manufacturing capabilities of companies that have already mass-produced similar products, rather than designing and building their own production lines, in order to reduce manufacturing costs. Fluence and Powin, the largest integrators of lithium-ion battery energy storage systems, adopt this model.

Even if the entire production process cannot be outsourced, industry centralization can lead to cost reduction. For example, if all VRFB, MAB, fuel cell, and electrolytic cell companies purchase stainless steel end plates, Teflon gaskets, graphite bipolar plates, and collectors (all common components) from third parties, economies of scale can be achieved, but people are concerned that intellectual property leakage is a major obstacle to this model.

The VRFB industry is exploring other cost reduction measures, including vertical integration into the system deployment of major vanadium suppliers such as Largeo Incorporated, Bushveld Mines, and other vanadium ore suppliers. Another solution is to rent the electrolyte to customers instead of selling it, which can eliminate some initial capital costs. Avalon, which merged to become Infinity Energy Systems, began this business model.

The shortage of key materials is another non-technical obstacle to energy storage deployment in the report, requiring a shift towards cheaper and more abundant chemical materials. However, it is still necessary to deploy mature solutions with current technology, despite resource constraints, which can help accelerate the maturity and scaling of the industrial chain, in order to facilitate the deployment of energy storage technologies using new materials from the same supply chain in the future.

Send the message "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" to the official account to obtain the original report "The battery deployment in the United States faces non-technical obstacles".

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