Lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from cellphones to cars, are increasingly saving electric grids around the world.
Batteries as large as shipping containers are being connected to power lines and installed beside solar panels and wind turbines. They soak up power when it’s plentiful and cheap and release it when electricity use soars, helping reduce the need for expensive power plants and lines.
American researchers invented the lithium-ion battery in the 1970s and later showed that the devices could help the electric grid. But for a long time batteries made little headway because grid managers and utility executives dismissed them as expensive and risky.
One of the first breakthroughs came about 15 years ago when engineers at a U.S. energy company installed one of the first lithium-ion batteries tied to a grid in a desert nearly 9,000 feet above sea level in Chile. Challenging conventional notions of how the electricity system should be run, that team helped prove that batteries could help make electric grids more stable and reliable.
The concept of storing energy was not new. Thomas Edison developed alkaline nickel-iron batteries largely for industry and early electric vehicles. Various companies tried other technologies like sodium sulfur, which have not gained much traction. And some utilities have long pumped water uphill so that later it could be sent back down to generate electricity.
But those systems were relatively limited. The kinds of lithium batteries installed in the Atacama Desert in 2009, by comparison, are now being used around the world.
The rapid growth of wind and solar power and the rising demand for electricity from data centers are making batteries a necessity. They store surplus renewable energy for when it’s not windy or sunny, and maintain a balance between energy supply and demand.
Consider California. In recent years, state officials have often asked residents to use less electricity on hot summer days to prevent power outages. But there have been no such alerts since 2022, largely because batteries have allowed California to use its abundant solar power well into the evening. Over the last seven years, the state added 30 times as much battery storage capacity as it had in 2018.
The rest of the world has also seen impressive growth, according to the International Energy Agency, a multilateral organization in Paris. The boom was made possible by a stunning 90 percent drop in the cost of batteries over the last 15 years as new factories have come on line. China is by far the world’s largest battery manufacturer, but Europe, India and the United States have recently been increasing production, too.
“Batteries are changing the game before our eyes,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said recently.
A Bumpy Start
The use of batteries on the grid did not come easy.
A Virginia company called AES began testing grid batteries in Indiana, Pennsylvania and California as early as 2008, but U.S. energy suppliers did not use them commercially until two years later. The pace was plodding for a while.
“There wasn’t the experience with battery storage,” said Carla Peterman, a former member of the California Energy Commission and now a vice president at Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility. “It was a bit of a chicken or the egg, where there wasn’t enough on there to really say that this could be a big part of the energy system.”
But some Americans clearly saw the benefits of batteries. One of them was Christopher Shelton, an executive at AES, which owns utilities and power plants across the world.
He began to look into lithium-ion batteries when his bosses asked employees to pitch proposals for a “billion-dollar idea.” Mr. Shelton said he thought batteries could reduce the need for power plants that utilities used only when electricity demand climbed to peak levels.
“Why would you build an asset that you weren’t going to use more than 5 percent of the time?” Mr. Shelton said. “We were saying batteries should be an alternative to peaker plants.”
He first installed battery cells at a nondescript electricity substation outside Indianapolis, a city known for its 500-mile car race. His company later connected one in Norristown, Pa., at an operations center of the nation’s largest grid manager, PJM Interconnection. The Los Angeles area was connected next, followed by a larger battery for the Indianapolis grid.
While his tests were successful, they did not sufficiently impress many American utility executives. The reaction was typical of an industry that prides itself for sticking with what it knows best — large coal, gas and nuclear power plants. Anything else has generally been treated as a threat that may cause blackouts.
“Utilities have long been skeptical of new technologies,” said Leah Stokes, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy politics and policy. “They know how to make a widget, which is a giant fossil fuel power plant, so they keep doing that.”
Drew Maloney, president and chief executive of the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade organization, disagrees with that assessment. “The U.S. energy grid is the world’s most important machine, and America’s electric companies are quick to pilot and deploy new technologies once they become commercially viable and affordable for customers,” he said.
But even now, U.S. utilities in many states are reluctant to add batteries. A lot fewer large batteries are being added in the Southeast, for example, than in California and Texas.
Utility executives are not the only ones who are skeptical. So are policymakers and many ordinary Americans.
Some local governments have banned big batteries because of safety concerns. In May and June, a large battery complex in Monterey County, Calif., was destroyed in a fire that spewed smoke and harmful chemicals.
Despite that disaster, energy experts say many risks have been addressed. The California fire happened in a type of battery that most companies no longer use. And those batteries were installed in a power plant building where the fire easily spread from device to device. Most batteries are installed outdoors to reduce the chances that fires spread.
‘Testing It on the Moon’
Not much beside the odd desert fox lives on the desolate plateau in Chile where AES set up its battery project. The site is several hours from the two closest airports, in Calama and Antofagasta.
After landing, visitors have to drive at least four hours to the salt flats of the Atacama Desert, where workers collect lithium — a key battery ingredient.
The AES camp is another hour away. It sits on a rocky unpaved path, lined with busted tires. Though temperatures during a late spring and early summer day can reach the 80s, the nights can be near freezing.
“It was like taking the battery and testing it on the moon,” said Joaquín Meléndez, an engineer who led the AES project there under Mr. Shelton.
In the early 2000s, Chile had an energy crisis because Argentina, its main supplier of natural gas, couldn’t provide enough of it. That left Chile, which has no domestic fuel sources, with too little energy for its people and its copper, iodine and lithium mines.
Chile was forced to rely on power plants that burned expensive imported coal. But those plants could not be easily turned up or down, and the needs of Chile’s mining companies fluctuated a lot.
That was where the batteries came in. While it can take a coal plant about 12 minutes to get going, batteries can discharge power almost instantly. By pairing the two, engineers realized that batteries could deliver the electricity that mines needed while coal plants fired up.
Mr. Meléndez worked 16-hour days for six months to connect the first commercialized lithium battery to an electric grid. That device still stands, though most of its tasks have been taken over by newer, more efficient and affordable units.
The project was immediately successful, helping keep the electricity system stable when mining operations caused surges that had previously led to grid failures and outages.
AES executives back in the United States kept close track of what was happening in Chile. And in 2010, the company installed commercial battery systems in New York and Texas. Two years later, AES began adding more batteries in Chile, including next to big solar farms.
Over the last decade, batteries have helped Chile use less coal. Last December, the country got more than 40 percent of its electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, up from 19 percent five years earlier, according to Ember Energy Research, a nonprofit. Australia, Britain, China, India and other countries have also been adding lots of renewable energy and batteries.
Mr. Shelton said that even he had been surprised by the recent rapid growth of batteries. “We under-predicted how far the prices would fall.”
Ivan Penn is a reporter based in Los Angeles and covers the energy industry. His work has included reporting on clean energy, failures in the electric grid and the economics of utility services.
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