Why we need to shoot carbon dioxide thousands of feet underground

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

There’s often one overlooked member in a duo. Peanut butter outshines jelly in a PB&J every time (at least in my eyes). For carbon capture and storage technology, the storage part tends to be the underappreciated portion. 

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) tech has two main steps (as you might guess from the name). First, carbon dioxide is filtered out of emissions at facilities like fossil-fuel power plants. Then it gets locked away, or stored.  

Wrangling pollution might seem like the important bit, and there’s often a lot of focus on what fraction of emissions a CCS system can filter out. But without storage, the whole project would be pretty useless. It’s really the combination of capture and long-term storage that helps to reduce climate impact. 

Storage is getting more attention lately, though, and there’s something of a carbon storage boom coming, as my colleague James Temple covered in his latest story. He wrote about what a rush of federal subsidies will mean for the CCS business in the US, and how supporting new projects could help us hit climate goals or push them further out of reach, depending on how we do it. 

The story got me thinking about the oft-forgotten second bit of CCS. Here’s where we might store captured carbon pollution, and why it matters. 

When it comes to storage, the main requirement is making sure the carbon dioxide can’t accidentally leak out and start warming up the atmosphere.

One surprising place that might fit the bill is oil fields. Instead of building wells to extract fossil fuels, companies are looking to build a new type of well where carbon dioxide that’s been pressurized until it reaches a supercritical state—in which liquid and gas phases don’t really exist—is pumped deep underground. With the right conditions (including porous rock deep down and a leak-preventing solid rock layer on top), the carbon dioxide will mostly stay put. 

Shooting carbon dioxide into the earth isn’t actually a new idea, though in the past it’s largely been used by the oil and gas industry for a very different purpose: pulling more oil out of the ground. In a process called enhanced oil recovery, carbon dioxide is injected into wells, where it frees up oil that’s otherwise tricky to extract. In the process, most of the injected carbon dioxide stays underground. 

But there’s a growing interest in sending the gas down there as an end in itself, sparked in part in the US by new tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Companies can rake in $85 per ton of carbon dioxide that’s captured and permanently stored in geological formations, depending on the source of the gas and how it’s locked away. 

In his story, James took a look at one proposed project in California, where one of the state’s largest oil and gas producers has secured draft permits from federal regulators. The project would inject carbon dioxide about 6,000 feet below the surface of the earth, and the company’s filings say the project could store tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide over the next couple of decades. 

It’s not just land-based projects that are sparking interest, though. State officials in Texas recently awarded a handful of leases for companies to potentially store carbon dioxide deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico.

And some companies want to store carbon dioxide in products and materials that we use, like concrete. Concrete is made by mixing reactive cement with water and material like sand; if carbon dioxide is injected into a fresh concrete mix, some of it will get involved in the reactions, trapping it in place. I covered how two companies tested out this idea in a newsletter last year.

Products we use every day, from diamonds to sunglasses, can be made with captured carbon dioxide. If we assume that those products stick around for a long time and don’t decompose (how valid this assumption is depends a lot on the product), one might consider these a form of long-term storage, though these markets probably aren’t big enough to make a difference in the grand scheme of climate change. 

Ultimately, though of course we need to emit less, we’ll still need to lock carbon away if we’re going to meet our climate goals.  

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For all the details on what to expect in the coming carbon storage boom, including more on the potential benefits and hazards of CCS, read James’s full story here.

This facility in Iceland uses mineral storage deep underground to lock away carbon dioxide that’s been vacuumed out of the atmosphere. See all the photos in this story from 2022. 

GOGORO

Another thing

When an earthquake struck Taiwan in April, the electrical grid faced some hiccups—and an unlikely hero quickly emerged in the form of battery-swap stations for electric scooters. In response to the problem, a group of stations stopped pulling power from the grid until it could recover. 

For more on how Gogoro is using battery stations as a virtual power plant to support the grid, check out my colleague Zeyi Yang’s latest story. And if you need a catch-up, check out this explainer on what a virtual power plant is and how it works. 

Keeping up with climate  

New York was set to implement congestion pricing, charging cars that drove into the busiest part of Manhattan. Then the governor put that plan on hold indefinitely. It’s a move that reveals just how tightly Americans are clinging to cars, even as the future of climate action may depend on our loosening that grip. (The Atlantic)

Speaking of cars, preparations in Paris for the Olympics reveal what a future with fewer of them could look like. The city has closed over 100 streets to vehicles, jacked up parking rates for SUVs, and removed tens of thousands of parking spots. (NBC News)

An electric lawnmower could be the gateway to a whole new world. People who have electric lawn equipment or solar panels are more likely to electrify other parts of their homes, like heating and cooking. (Canary Media)

Companies are starting to look outside the battery. From massive moving blocks to compressed air in caverns, energy storage systems are getting weirder as the push to reduce prices intensifies. (Heatmap)

Rivian announced updated versions of its R1T and R1S vehicles. The changes reveal the company’s potential path toward surviving in a difficult climate for EV makers. (Tech Crunch)

First responders in the scorching southwestern US are resorting to giant ice cocoons to help people suffering from extreme heat. (New York Times)

→ Here’s how much heat your body can take. (MIT Technology Review)

One oil producer is getting closer to making what it calls “net-zero oil” by pumping captured carbon dioxide down into wells to get more oil out. The implications for the climate and the future of fossil fuels in our economy are … complicated. (Cipher)

Why bigger EVs aren’t always better

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

SUVs are taking over the world—larger vehicle models made up nearly half of new car sales globally in 2023, a new record for the segment. 

There are a lot of reasons to be nervous about the ever-expanding footprint of vehicles, from pedestrian safety and road maintenance concerns to higher greenhouse-gas emissions. But in a way, SUVs also represent a massive opportunity for climate action, since pulling the worst gas-guzzlers off the roads and replacing them with electric versions could be a big step in cutting pollution. 

It’s clear that we’re heading toward a future with bigger cars. Here’s what it might mean for the climate, and for our future on the road. 

SUVs accounted for 48% of global car sales in 2023, according to a new analysis from the International Energy Agency. This is a continuation of a trend toward bigger cars—just a decade ago, SUVs only made up about 20% of new vehicle sales. 

Big vehicles mean big emissions numbers. Last year there were more than 360 million SUVs on the roads, and they produced a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. If SUVs were a country, they’d have the fifth-highest emissions of any nation on the planet—more than Japan. Of all the energy-related emissions growth last year, over 20% can be attributed to SUVs. 

There are several factors driving the world’s move toward larger vehicles. Larger cars tend to have higher profit margins, so companies may be more likely to make and push those models. And drivers are willing to jump on the bandwagon. I understand the appeal—I learned to drive in a huge SUV, and being able to stretch out my legs and float several feet above traffic has its perks. 

Electric vehicles are very much following the trend, with several companies unveiling  larger models in the past few years. Some of these newly released electric SUVs are seeing massive success. The Tesla Model Y, released in 2020, was far and away the most popular EV last year, with over 1.2 million units sold in 2023. The BYD Song (also an SUV) took second place with 630,000 sold. 

Globally, SUVs made up nearly 50% of new EV sales in 2023, compared to just under 20% in 2018, according to the IEA’s Global EV Outlook 2024. There’s also been a shift away from small cars (think the size of the Fiat 500) and toward large ones (similar to the BMW 7-series). 

And big-car obsession is a global phenomenon. The US is the land of the free and the home of the massive vehicles—SUVs made up 65% of new electric-vehicle sales in the country in 2023. But other major markets aren’t all that far behind: in Europe, the share was 52%, and in China, it was 36%. (You can see the above chart broken down by region from the IEA here.)

So it’s clear that we’re clamoring for bigger cars. Now what? 

One way of looking at this whole thing is that SUVs offer up an incredible opportunity for climate action. EVs will reduce emissions over their life span relative to gas-powered versions of the same model, so electrifying the biggest emitters on the roads would have an outsize impact. If all gas-powered and hybrid SUVs sold in 2023 were instead electric vehicles, about 770 million metric tons of carbon dioxide would be avoided over the lifetime of those vehicles, according to the IEA report. That’s equivalent to all of China’s road emissions last year. 

I previously wrote a somewhat hesitant defense of large EVs for this reason—electric SUVs aren’t perfect, but they could still help us address climate change. If some drivers are willing to buy an EV but aren’t willing to downsize their cars, then having larger electric options available could be a huge lever for climate action. 

But there are several very legitimate reasons why not everyone is welcoming the future of massive cars (even electric ones) with open arms. Larger vehicles are harder on roads, making upkeep more expensive. SUVs and other big vehicles are way more dangerous for pedestrians, too. Vehicles with higher front ends and blunter profiles are 45% more likely to cause fatalities in crashes with pedestrians. 

Bigger EVs could also have a huge effect on the amount of mining we’ll need to do to meet demand for metals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt. One 2023 study found that larger vehicles could increase the amount of mining needed more than 50% by 2050, relative to the amount that would be necessary if people drove smaller vehicles. Given that mining is energy intensive and can come with significant environmental harms, it’s not an unreasonable worry. 

New technologies could help reduce the mining we need to do for some materials: LFP batteries that don’t contain nickel or cobalt are quickly growing in market share, especially in China, and they could help reduce demand for those metals.

Another potential solution is reducing the demand for bigger cars in the first place. Policies have historically had a hand in pushing people toward larger cars and could help us make a U-turn on car bloat. Some countries, including Norway and France, now charge more in taxes or registration for larger vehicles. Paris recently jacked up parking rates for SUVs. 

For now, our vehicles are growing, and if we’re going to have SUVs on the roads, then we should have electric options. But bigger isn’t always better. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

I’ve defended big EVs in the past—SUVs come with challenges, but electric ones are hands-down better for emissions than gas-guzzlers. Read this 2023 newsletter for more. 

The average size of batteries in EVs has steadily ticked up in recent years, as I touched on in this newsletter from last year. 

Electric cars are still cars, and smaller, safer EVs, along with more transit options, will be key to hitting our climate goals, Paris Marx argued in this 2022 op-ed. 

Keeping up with climate  

We might be underestimating how much power transmission lines can carry. Sensors can give grid operators a better sense of capacity based on factors like temperature and wind speed, and it could help projects hook up to the grid faster. (Canary Media)

North America could be in for an active fire season, though it’s likely not going to rise to the level of 2023. (New Scientist)

Climate change is making some types of turbulence more common, and that could spell trouble for flying. Studying how birds move might provide clues about dangerous spots. (BBC)

The perceived slowdown for EVs in the US is looking more like a temporary blip than an ongoing catastrophe. Tesla is something of an outlier with its recent slump—most automakers saw greater than 50% growth in the first quarter of this year. (Bloomberg)

This visualization shows just how dominant China is in the EV supply chain, from mining materials like graphite to manufacturing battery cells. (Cipher News)

Climate change is coming for our summer oysters. The variety that have been bred to be eaten year round are sensitive to extreme heat, making their future rocky. (The Atlantic)

The US has new federal guidelines for carbon offsets. It’s an effort to fix up an industry that studies and reports have consistently shown doesn’t work very well. (New York Times)

The most stubborn myth about heat pumps is that they don’t work in cold weather. Heat pumps are actually more efficient than gas furnaces in cold conditions. (Wired)

AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Tech companies keep finding new ways to bring AI into every facet of our lives. AI has taken over my search engine results, and new virtual assistants from Google and OpenAI announced last week are bringing the world eerily close to the 2013 film Her (in more ways than one).

As AI has become more integrated into our world, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the technology’s rising electricity demand. You may have seen the headlines proclaiming that AI uses as much electricity as small countries, that it’ll usher in a fossil-fuel resurgence, and that it’s already challenging the grid.  

So how worried should we be about AI’s electricity demands? Well, it’s complicated. 

Using AI for certain tasks can come with a significant energy price tag. With some powerful AI models, generating an image can require as much energy as charging up your phone, as my colleague Melissa Heikkilä explained in a story from December. Create 1,000 images with a model like Stable Diffusion XL, and you’ve produced as much carbon dioxide as driving just over four miles in a gas-powered car, according to the researchers Melissa spoke to. 

But while generated images are splashy, there are plenty of AI tasks that don’t use as much energy. For example, creating images is thousands of times more energy-intensive than generating text. And using a smaller model that’s tailored to a specific task, rather than a massive, all-purpose generative model, can be dozens of times more efficient. In any case, generative AI models require energy, and we’re using them a lot. 

Electricity consumption from data centers, AI, and cryptocurrency could reach double 2022 levels by 2026, according to projections from the International Energy Agency. Those technologies together made up roughly 2% of global electricity demand in 2022. Note that these numbers aren’t just for AI—it’s tricky to nail down AI’s specific contribution, so keep that in mind when you see predictions about electricity demand from data centers. 

There’s a wide range of uncertainty in the IEA’s projections, depending on factors like how quickly deployment increases and how efficient computing processes get. On the low end, the sector could require about 160 terawatt-hours of additional electricity by 2026. On the higher end, that number might be 590 TWh. As the report puts it, AI, data centers, and cryptocurrency together are likely adding “at least one Sweden or at most one Germany” to global electricity demand. 

In total, the IEA projects, the world will add about 3,500 TWh of electricity demand over that same period—so while computing is certainly part of the demand crunch, it’s far from the whole story. Electric vehicles and the industrial sector will both be bigger sources of growth in electricity demand than data centers in the European Union, for example. 

Still, some big tech companies are suggesting that AI could get in the way of their climate goals. Microsoft pledged four years ago to bring its greenhouse-gas emissions to zero (or even lower) by the end of the decade. But the company’s recent sustainability report shows that instead, emissions are still ticking up, and some executives point to AI as a reason. “In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, told Bloomberg Green.

What I found interesting, though, is that it’s not AI’s electricity demand that’s contributing to Microsoft’s rising emissions, at least on paper. The company has agreements in place and buys renewable-energy credits so that electricity needs for all its functions (including AI) are met with renewables. (How much these credits actually help is questionable, but that’s a story for another day.) 

Instead, infrastructure growth could be adding to the uptick in emissions. Microsoft plans to spend $50 billion between July 2023 and June 2024 on expanding data centers to meet demand for AI products, according to the Bloomberg story. Building those data centers requires materials that can be carbon intensive, like steel, cement, and of course chips. 

Some important context to consider in the panic over AI’s energy demand is that while the technology is new, this sort of concern isn’t, as Robinson Meyer laid out in an April story in Heatmap.

Meyer points to estimates from 1999 that information technologies were already accounting for up to 13% of US power demand, and that personal computers and the internet could eat up half the grid’s capacity within the decade. That didn’t end up happening, and even at the time, computing was actually accounting for something like 3% of electricity demand. 

We’ll have to wait and see if doomsday predictions about AI’s energy demand play out. The way I see it, though, AI is probably going to be a small piece of a much bigger story. Ultimately, rising electricity demand from AI is in some ways no different from rising demand from EVs, heat pumps, or factory growth. It’s really how we meet that demand that matters. 

If we build more fossil-fuel plants to meet our growing electricity demand, it’ll come with negative consequences for the climate. But if we use rising electricity demand as a catalyst to lean harder into renewable energy and other low-carbon power sources, and push AI to get more efficient, doing more with less energy, then we can continue to slowly clean up the grid, even as AI continues to expand its reach in our lives. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Check out my colleague Melissa’s story on the carbon footprint of AI from December here. 

For a closer look at Microsoft’s new sustainability report and the effects of AI, give this Bloomberg Green story from reporters Akshat Rathi and Dina Bass a read. 

Robinson Meyer at Heatmap dug into the context around the AI energy demand in this April piece. 

Another thing

Missed our event last week on thermal batteries? Good news—the recording is now available for subscribers!

For the latest in our Roundtables series, I spoke with Amy Nordrum, MIT Technology Review executive editor, about how the technology works, who the crucial players are, and what I’m watching for next. Check it out here. 

Keeping up with climate  

Changing how we generate heat in industry will be crucial to cleaning up that sector in China, according to a new report. Thermal batteries and heat pumps could meet most of the demand. (Axios)

Form Energy is known for its iron-air batteries, which could help unlock cheap energy storage on the grid. Now, the company is working on research to produce green iron. (Canary Media)

The NET Power pilot in Texas is working to generate electricity with natural gas while capturing the vast majority of emissions. But carbon capture technology in power plants is far from proven. (Cipher News)

MIT spinoff Electrified Thermal Solutions is working to bring its thermal battery technology to commercial use. The company’s product is roughly the size of an elevator and can reach temperatures up to 1,800 °C. (Inside Climate News)

Mexico City has seen constant struggles over water. Now groundwater is drying up, and a system of dams and canals may soon be unable to provide water to the city. (New York Times)

Sodium-ion batteries could offer cheap energy storage while avoiding material crunches for metals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt. China has a massive head start, leaving other countries scrambling to catch up. (Latitude Media)

→ Here’s how this abundant material could unlock cheaper energy storage. (MIT Technology Review)

Biochar is made by heating up biomass like wood and plants in low-oxygen environments. It’s a simple approach to carbon removal, but it doesn’t always get as much attention as other carbon removal technologies. (Heatmap)

This startup wants ships to capture their own emissions by bubbling exhaust through seawater and limestone and dumping it into the ocean. Experts caution that some components of the exhaust could harm sea life if they’re not handled properly. (New Scientist)

Why EV charging needs more than Tesla

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Tesla, the world’s largest EV maker, laid off its entire charging team last week. 

The timing of this move is absolutely baffling. We desperately need many more EV chargers to come online as quickly as possible, and Tesla has been a charging powerhouse. It’s in the midst of opening its charging network to other automakers and establishing its technology as the de facto standard in the US. Now, we’re already seeing new Supercharger sites canceled because of this move. 

The charging meltdown at Tesla could slow progress on EVs overall, and ultimately, the whole situation shows why climate technology needs a whole lot more than Tesla. 

Tesla first unveiled the Supercharger network in 2012 with six locations in the western US. As of 2024, the company operates over 50,000 Superchargers worldwide. (By the way, I want to note that I briefly interned at Tesla in 2016. I don’t have any ties to or financial interest in the company today.) 

The Supercharger network helped make Tesla an EV juggernaut. Fast charging speeds and a navigation system that took the guesswork out of finding charging stations helped ease the transition for people buying their first EVs. Tesla operates more fast chargers than anyone else in the US, and the reliability of those chargers is leagues better than that of competitors. For a long time, this was all exclusive to Tesla drivers. 

Over the past year, Tesla has begun cracking open the doors to its charging network. The company made some of its stations available to all EVs, in part to go after incentives designated for private companies building public chargers. 

In the US, Tesla has also persuaded other automakers to adopt its charging connector, which it standardized and named the North American Charging Standard. In May 2023, Ford announced a move to adopt the NACS, and nearly every other automaker selling EVs in the US has followed suit.

Then, last week, Tesla laid off its 500-person charging team. The move came as part of wider layoffs that are expected to affect 10% of Tesla’s global workforce. Even interns weren’t immune.

Tesla “still plans to grow the Supercharger network,” though the focus will shift to maintaining and expanding existing locations rather than adding new ones, according to a post from CEO Elon Musk on the site formerly known as Twitter. (How does the company plan to expand or even maintain existing locations with apparently no dedicated charging team? Your guess is as good as mine. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

But the effects from losing the charging team were immediate. Tesla backed out of a handful of leases for upcoming Supercharger locations in New York. In an email, the company told suppliers to hold off on breaking ground on new construction projects. 

The move is a concerning one at a crucial time for EV charging infrastructure. Right now, there are nowhere near enough chargers installed in the US to support a shift to electric vehicles. If EVs make up half of new-car sales by the end of the decade, we’ll need roughly 1.2 million public chargers installed by then, according to a 2023 study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Today, the country has 170,000 charging ports available. 

In a recent poll, nearly 80% of US adults said that a lack of charging infrastructure is a primary reason for not buying an EV. That was true whether they lived in a city, in the suburbs, or in more rural areas.

In a way, it does make sense that Tesla appears to be uninterested in being the one to build out a public charging network. Chargers are costly to build and maintain, and they might not be all that profitable in the near term. 

According to analysis by BNEF, Tesla pulled in about $1.7 billion from charging last year, only about 1.5% of the company’s total revenue. Opening up chargers to vehicles from other automakers could help push revenue from this source up to $7.4 billion annually by the end of the decade. But that’s still a relatively small piece of Tesla’s total potential pie. 

Musk seems more interested in pursuing buzzy ideas like robotaxis than doing the difficult and expensive work of providing EV charging as a public service. 

Honestly, I think this move is a wake-up call for the EV industry. Tesla has played an undeniable role in bringing EVs to the mainstream. But we’re in a new stage of the game now, one that’s less about sleek sports cars and more about deploying known technologies and keeping them working. 

Other companies may step in to help fill the charging gap Tesla is opening. Revel expressed interest in taking over those canceled leases in New York City, for instance. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for a shiny new company to be our charging hero. 

Cutting emissions and remaking our economy will require buckling down to deploy and maintain solutions that we already know work, whether that’s in transportation or any other sector. For EV charging, and for climate technology as a whole, we need more than Tesla. Here’s hoping we can get it. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Perhaps the single biggest remaining barrier to EV adoption is a lack of charging infrastructure, as I wrote in a newsletter last year.

We need way more chargers to support the number of new EVs that are expected to hit the roads this decade. I dug into how many for a news story last year.

New battery technology could help EV batteries charge even faster. Learn what could be coming next in this story from August.

Another thing

Meat is a major climate problem. Whether solutions come in the form of plant-based alternatives or products grown in the lab, we shouldn’t expect them to solve every problem under the sun, argues my colleague James Temple, in a new essay published this week. Give it a read! 

Keeping up with climate  

Alternative jet fuels have a corn problem. The crop can be used to make fuels that qualify for tax credits in the US, but critics are skeptical about just how helpful they’ll be in efforts to cut emissions. (MIT Technology Review)

This startup is making fuel from carbon dioxide. Infinium’s Texas facility came online in late 2023, and its synthetic fuels could help clean up aviation and trucking—but only if the price is right. (Bloomberg)

New York City pizza shops are going electric. A citywide ordinance just went into effect that requires wood- and coal-burning ovens to cut their pollution, and many are turning to electric ovens instead of undertaking the costly upgrade. (New York Times)

Building a new energy system happens one project at a time. I loved this list of 10 potentially make-or-break projects that represent the potential future of our grid. (Heatmap)

→ The list includes a new site from Fervo in Utah, expected in 2026. Get the inside look at the company’s technology in this feature story from last year. (MIT Technology Review)

Funding for climate-tech startups in Africa is growing, with businesses raising more than $3.4 billion since 2019. But there’s still a long way to go to help the continent meet its climate goals. (Associated Press)

One very big, and very simple, thing is holding back heat pumps: a lack of workers. We need more people to make and install the appliances, which help cut emissions by using electricity to efficiently heat and cool spaces. (Wired)

→ Heat pumps are booming, and they’re on our list of 2024 Breakthrough Technologies. (MIT Technology Review)

Compressing air and storing it underground could help clean up the grid. Yes, really. Canadian company Hydrostor is close to breaking ground on its first large long-duration energy storage project later this year in Australia. (Inside Climate News)

Three takeaways about the current state of batteries

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Batteries are on my mind this week. (Aren’t they always?) But I’ve got two extra reasons to be thinking about them today. 

First, there’s a new special report from the International Energy Agency all about how crucial batteries are for our future energy systems. The report calls batteries a “master key,” meaning they can unlock the potential of other technologies that will help cut emissions. Second, we’re seeing early signs in California of how the technology might be earning that “master key” status already by helping renewables play an even bigger role on the grid. So let’s dig into some battery data together. 

1) Battery storage in the power sector was the fastest-growing commercial energy technology on the planet in 2023. 

Deployment doubled over the previous year’s figures, hitting nearly 42 gigawatts. That includes utility-scale projects as well as projects installed “behind the meter,” meaning they’re somewhere like a home or business and don’t interact with the grid. 

Over half the additions in 2023 were in China, which has been the leading market in batteries for energy storage for the past two years. Growth is faster there than the global average, and installations tripled from 2022 to last year. 

One driving force of this quick growth in China is that some provincial policies require developers of new solar and wind power projects to pair them with a certain level of energy storage, according to the IEA report.

Intermittent renewables like wind and solar have grown rapidly in China and around the world, and the technologies are beginning to help clean up the grid. But these storage requirement policies reveal the next step: installing batteries to help unlock the potential of renewables even during times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. 

2) Batteries are starting to show exactly how they’ll play a crucial role on the grid.

When there are small amounts of renewables, it’s not all that important to have storage available, since the sun’s rising and setting will cause little more than blips in the overall energy mix. But as the share increases, some of the challenges with intermittent renewables become very clear. 

We’ve started to see this play out in California. Renewables are able to supply nearly all the grid’s energy demand during the day on sunny days. The problem is just how different the picture is at noon and just eight hours later, once the sun has gone down. 

In the middle of the day, there’s so much solar power available that gigawatts are basically getting thrown away. Electricity prices can actually go negative. Then, later on, renewables quickly fall off, and other sources like natural gas need to ramp up to meet demand. 

But energy storage is starting to catch up and make a dent in smoothing out that daily variation. On April 16, for the first time, batteries were the single greatest power source on the grid in California during part of the early evening, just as solar fell off for the day. (Look for the bump in the darkest line on the graph above—it happens right after 6 p.m.)

Batteries have reached this number-one status several more times over the past few weeks, a sign that the energy storage now installed—10 gigawatts’ worth—is beginning to play a part in a balanced grid. 

3) We need to build a lot more energy storage. Good news: batteries are getting cheaper.

While early signs show just how important batteries can be in our energy system, we still need gobs more to actually clean up the grid. If we’re going to be on track to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by midcentury, we’ll need to increase battery deployment sevenfold. 

The good news is the technology is becoming increasingly economical. Battery costs have fallen drastically, dropping 90% since 2010, and they’re not done yet. According to the IEA report, battery costs could fall an additional 40% by the end of this decade. Those further cost declines would make solar projects with battery storage cheaper to build than new coal power plants in India and China, and cheaper than new gas plants in the US. 

Batteries won’t be the magic miracle technology that cleans up the entire grid. Other sources of low-carbon energy that are more consistently available, like geothermal, or able to ramp up and down to meet demand, like hydropower, will be crucial parts of the energy system. But I’m interested to keep watching just how batteries contribute to the mix. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Some companies are looking beyond lithium for stationary energy storage. Dig into the prospects for sodium-based batteries in this story from last year.

Lithium-sulfur technology could unlock cheaper, better batteries for electric vehicles that can go farther on a single charge. I covered one company trying to make them a reality earlier this year.

SIMON LANDREIN

Another thing

Thermal batteries are so hot right now. In fact, readers chose the technology as our 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2024.

To celebrate, we’re hosting an online event in a couple of weeks for subscribers. We’ll dig into why thermal batteries are so interesting and why this is a breakthrough moment for the technology. It’s going to be a lot of fun, so subscribe if you haven’t already and then register here to join us on May 16 at noon Eastern time.

You’ll be able to submit a question when you register—please do that so I know what you want to hear about! See you there! 

Keeping up with climate  

New rules that force US power plants to slash emissions could effectively spell the end of coal power in the country. Here are five things to know about the regulations. (New York Times)

Wind farms use less land than you might expect. Turbines really take up only a small fraction of the land where they’re sited, and co-locating projects with farms or other developments can help reduce environmental impact. (Washington Post)

The fourth reactor at Plant Vogtle in Georgia officially entered commercial operation this week. The new reactor will provide electricity for up to 500,000 homes and businesses. (Axios) 

A new factory will be the first full-scale plant to produce sodium-ion batteries in the US. The chemistry could provide a cheaper alternative to the standard lithium-ion chemistry and avoid material constraints. (Bloomberg)

→ I wrote about the potential for sodium-based batteries last year. (MIT Technology Review)

Tesla has apparently laid off a huge portion of its charging team. The move comes as the company’s charging port has been adopted by most major automakers. (The Verge)

A vegan cheese was up for a major food award. Then, things got messy. (Washington Post)

→ For a look at how Climax Foods makes its plant-based cheese with AI, check out this story from our latest magazine issue. (MIT Technology Review)

Someday mining might be done with … seaweed? Early research is looking into using seaweed to capture and concentrate high-value metals. (Hakai)

The planet’s oceans contain enormous amounts of energy. Harnessing it is an early-stage industry, but some proponents argue there’s a role for wave and tidal power technologies. (Undark)