From November 11th to 22nd, 2024, the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) was held in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES) Council released its annual report for 2024, highlighting the progress made and future opportunities, as well as the challenges and barriers in applying technologies that store energy for hours or days, reemphasizing the necessity and urgency of developing long-duration storage.

The report states that LDES is a key tool for achieving net-zero emissions targets, and it is essential for governments and grid operators to fulfill their sustainability commitments. Currently, about 90% of LDES capacity is from pumped hydro storage, but this is expected to decrease to around 76% by 2035. The LDES Commission recommends in its new report that global grids need to deploy 1TW of long-duration energy storage (LDES) by 2030, increasing to 8TW by 2040, to align with multilateral and national energy transition goals. However, barriers to LDES development include inadequate funding, lack of clear targets, regulatory challenges, and slow adoption of new technologies.

▲ The net-zero emissions targets of various countries

The LDES Commission itself was launched at COP26 by technology providers, end users, and other stakeholders, with the aim of accelerating the development of LDES. It echoes recent views from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), and the United Nations itself that the decarbonization of the energy system is not happening fast enough.

As chair of the 29th UN climate change conference (COP29), Azerbaijan is urging world leaders attending the meeting to sign up to a commitment to boost installed storage capacity in operation across the globe to 1.5TW by the end of 2030, IRENA said, adding that would triple the world's renewable energy capacity to more than 11TW – as promised at last year's COP28, with the LDES committee also expressing support for the storage target.

The technical companies involved in the LDES Commission span a wide range of electrochemical, thermal, and mechanical technologies, each designed to provide storage capacity when discharging for more than 8 hours, with some extended to days, weeks, or seasons. The LDES Commission reports that there are 0.22TW of deployment channels for such technologies globally, and to reach the 8TW predicted by the trade group by the end of the next decade represents a need for a fiftyfold increase in speed and plays a role in integrating variable renewable energy (VRE) by storing excess energy and heat. According to the LDES Commission, global decarbonization goals are unachievable unless long-duration energy storage is increased fiftyfold by 2024.

The Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES) Commission has conducted preliminary analysis of country-level LDES capacity needs, providing a foundational framework for a series of key countries (shown in the figure below) to build upon and advance understanding of the scale of LDES needed to meet net-zero goals.

LDES Task Force members have deployed long-duration energy storage projects across all six inhabited continents, with durations of at least 8 hours. In addition to policymakers, the financial sector is increasingly recognizing the centrality of long-duration energy storage. About two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies have made significant climate action commitments. In a new report, the LDES task force says as much as $5.4 trillion could be saved annually from global energy system costs by 2024 through investment in 8TW of long-term storage. The benefits are not limited to integrating high shares of VRE onto the grid. Long-duration energy storage can also reduce generation curtailment, defer expensive transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure investments, increase carrying capacity, and enhance network resilience.

The LDES Task Force has identified seven key elements for driving the growth of long-duration energy storage in its final report, including raising awareness of LDES technologies, conducting an assessment of LDES demand, setting deployment targets for LDES, allocating funding for pre-commercial technologies, providing market access and visibility of revenue opportunities for LDES, implementing effective grid pricing, and streamlining the grid connection process for LDES technologies. These require the collective efforts of all stakeholders to ultimately drive the rapid growth of long-duration energy storage installations.

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