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<ul><li>These metallic electrodes in the new battery can remain liquefied at a temperature of <a href="https://news.utexas.edu/2020/07/06/new-room-temperature-liquid-metal-battery-could-be-the-path-to-powering-the-future/">20 degrees Celsius, the lowest operating temperature ever recorded</a> for a liquid-metal battery.</li><li>Unlike the current batteries, these can be scaled up or down easily, depending on the power needed. The bigger the battery, the more power it can deliver.</li><li>The researchers also noted that it may be possible to create a battery with even lower melting points using different materials.</li></ul>The researchers at <keyword id="794879" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="The-University-of-Texas">The University of Texas</keyword> claim to have developed a new type of battery that combines the many benefits of <a href="https://news.utexas.edu/2020/07/06/new-room-temperature-liquid-metal-battery-could-be-the-path-to-powering-the-future/">existing liquid and solid-state batteries while eliminating their key shortcomings</a> and saving energy.<br /><br />According to the researchers, this will be the first all-liquid-metal battery that can operate at room temperature, and it apparently outperforms lithium-ion batteries. <br /><br />Lithium-ion batteries are used to power an increasing number of devices, such as thermometers, remote car locks, MP3 players, calculators and battery backup systems in computers. The Lithium-ion batteries are also commonly used in electric vehicles because of their high energy density compared to their weight. <br /><br />“This battery can provide all the benefits of both solid- and liquid-state—including more energy, increased stability and flexibility—without the respective drawbacks, while also saving energy,” said Yu Ding, a postdoctoral researcher in associate professor Guihua Yu’s research group.<br /><br /><div type="image" title="texas battery 1" msid="76846357" hostid="261"></div><br /><strong>What's different?<br /></strong><br />In liquid metal batteries, the electrodes are made of liquid metals, which makes it less susceptible to wearing out than solid batteries, since dendrites don’t form and damage the components. However, liquid-state batteries can deliver energy more efficiently, but they either fall short on high energy demands or require <a href="https://techxplore.com/news/2020-07-room-temperature-liquid-metal-battery-path-powering.html">significant resources to constantly heat the electrodes and keep them molten</a>.<br /><br />According to researchers, this battery includes the “best of both worlds” of liquid- and solid-state batteries. And, can be scaled up or down easily, depending on the power needed. The bigger the battery, the more power it can deliver.<br /><br /><strong>Stays liquefied at a room temperature <br /></strong><br />Usually, the liquid-metal batteries must be kept at temperatures above 240 <keyword id="136546" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="degrees-Celsius">degrees Celsius</keyword> in order to keep the metals liquid. However, these metallic electrodes in the new battery can remain liquefied at a temperature of <a href="https://techxplore.com/news/2020-07-room-temperature-liquid-metal-battery-path-powering.html">20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), the lowest operating temperature ever recorded</a> for a liquid-metal battery, according to the researchers.<br /><br /><div type="image" title="texas battery 2" msid="76846376" hostid="261"></div><br />The new battery includes a sodium-potassium alloy as the anode and a gallium-based alloy as the cathode. Anode and cathode are the parts of the battery through which the current enters and exits into an electrical device. The researchers also noted that it may be possible to create a battery with even lower melting points using different materials.<br /><br /><strong>Still at a nascent stage<br /></strong><br />The researchers are still working to find <keyword id="8512007" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="alternative-materials">alternative materials</keyword> that can deliver the same performance while reducing the cost of production. As the gallium remains an expensive material which constitutes the backbone of this new battery.<br /><br />The researchers are also working to increase the power of the battery at the room-temperature battery as it “cannot compete with high-temperature, liquid-metal batteries at the current stage, better power capability is expected if advanced electrolytes are designed with high conductivity,” <a href="https://news.utexas.edu/2020/07/06/new-room-temperature-liquid-metal-battery-could-be-the-path-to-powering-the-future/">said Ding</a>.<br /><br /><strong>SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/elyments-dips-to-3-5-stars-on-google-play-store-heres-what-analysts-believe-indias-new-social-network-needs-in-order-to-be-successful/articleshow/76845819.cms" data-type="tilCustomLink">Elyments dips to 3.5 stars on Google Play Store — Here's what analysts believe India's new social network needs in order to be successful</a><br /><br /></strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/corporates/news/hul-vs-emami-a-lawyer-explains-whats-fair-and-not-in-the-battle-of-brands/articleshow/76829901.cms" data-type="tilCustomLink"><strong>HUL vs Emami — A lawyer explains what’s fair and not in the battle of brands</strong></a><br />

This new room-temperature liquid-metal battery may last longer than lithium-ion batteries, says a new research

<ul class="summary-list"><li style="text-align: left;">An enormous <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-rising-stars-leaders-of-clean-energy-2020-6">transition</a> is underway across the electric grid.</li><li style="text-align: left;">Power plants that run on fossil fuels are being replaced by <keyword id="45681" type="TECHNOLOGY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Solar">solar</keyword> panels and wind farms and more batteries and electric vehicles are plugging in every day. </li><li style="text-align: left;">Once niche, the <keyword id="154273" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="clean-energy">clean energy</keyword> industry is going mainstream. Goldman Sachs says it's an investment opportunity worth as much as <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/renewable-energy-trillion-investment-opportunity-surpass-oil-first-time-goldman-2020-6-1029318482">$16 trillion through 2030</a>. </li><li style="text-align: left;">Within the industry, researchers, entrepreneurs, and workers are bringing a wide range of solutions to bear, from batteries that store <keyword id="6357014" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="energy">energy</keyword> in molten salt to water turbines that are fish-friendly. </li><li style="text-align: left;">Business Insider has identified <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-rising-stars-leaders-of-clean-energy-2020-6">the 21 emerging leaders in clean energy</a> that we think everyone should know.</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">The global energy industry is in the middle of an epic transition, away from fossil fuels and towards clean sources of energy. </p><p style="text-align: left;">This year, for example, the US is set to generate more electricity from renewable sources than from coal <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/climate/coronavirus-coal-electricity-renewables.html">for the first time in history</a>. Meanwhile, 2020 is also expected to be a <a href="https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/coronavirus-solar-growth-in-2020-but-with-significant-cuts-to-distributed-solar">record year for solar power</a>, and energy storage installations including batteries <a href="https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/us-residential-storage-shines-in-first-quarter-nabs-fourth-consecutive-record">are set to double</a>. </p><p style="text-align: left;">This transition, though ultimately motivated by the threat of climate change, has created an enormous economic opportunity.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Clean energy was the target of more than $600 billion of investment last year, relative to investment in the broader energy industry of about $1.9 trillion, according to the <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2020/key-findings?utm_content=buffer78a8b&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=bufferpaign=buffer">International Energy Agency</a>. And looking forward, Goldman Sachs says <keyword id="34553" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="renewable-energy">renewable energy</keyword> is an investment opportunity worth as much as <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/renewable-energy-trillion-investment-opportunity-surpass-oil-first-time-goldman-2020-6-1029318482">$16 trillion, through 2030</a>. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><strong><a href="http://newsletter.businessinsider.com/join/4np/power-line"><em>Click here to subscribe to Power Line</em></a><em>, Business Insider's weekly energy newsletter.</em></strong></p><p style="text-align: left;">It's now undeniable that the industry is going mainstream. In the US alone, it's home to more than <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/30/clean-energy-employs-25-million-in-us-report.html">2.5 million</a> workers employed within an expansive corporate landscape that has startups that store energy in molten salt on one end and solar giants like Sunrun deploying droves of rooftop panels on the other.</p><p style="text-align: left;">That's why we embarked on this project, a showcase of the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-rising-stars-leaders-of-clean-energy-2020-6">rising stars of clean energy</a> — 21 people quickly making a name for themselves within the industry, who we think everyone should know.</p><p style="text-align: left;">These <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-rising-stars-leaders-of-clean-energy-2020-6">rising stars</a>, identified by experts as emerging leaders within the industry, are taking a bite of this $600 billion market while promising massive gains for the environment.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Dandelion Energy's Kathy Hannun, for example, has found carbon savings in holes dug under homes in the Northeast. Swift Solar's Joel Jean, on the other hand, is designing a new generation of hyper-efficient solar panels.  </p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-rising-stars-leaders-of-clean-energy-2020-6">Click here to meet the rising stars of clean energy</a></h2>

Meet the rising stars who are taking on the $1.9 trillion energy industry and cleaning up the electrical grid

<p><em>Hello everyone! </em><em>Welcome to this weekly roundup of Business Insider stories from executive editor Matt Turner. Please <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/subscription/prime-discount?r=birefer-mturner">subscribe to Business Insider here</a> to get this newsletter in your inbox every Sunday.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p>Hello!</p><p>Tech companies splash out huge sums of cash to attract top talent, as Rob Price reported this week.</p><p>How much exactly? From his story:</p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>Compensation overall remains a closely guarded secret, with firms refusing to disclose their rates as employees take to forums and anonymous social networks to compare pay packets.</em></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>But there's one organization that knows exactly how much tech workers are getting paid: the US government.</em></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>When American companies file paperwork for visas on behalf of current or prospective foreign workers, they're required to say how much compensation the workers are being offered. And every year, the Office of Foreign Labor Certification discloses this salary data in an enormous, enlightening dataset.</em></p><p>Rob worked with Skye Gould and William Edwards to analyze this data to see how 13 key companies, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, pay their staff.</p><p>To be sure, there are caveats. For example, the data relates to the 2019 fiscal year. A lot has changed since then. The data only reveals what companies pay foreign workers in roles for which they have hired immigrant workers. And the database also does not appear to include equity grants. Still, as Rob reports, the data is a powerful tool. From his story:</p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>If you're applying for a certain job, how much should you ask for? If you transfer internally, how might that affect your pay? Are you being underpaid compared with your coworkers?</em></p><p>You can read the full story here:</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-big-tech-faang-companies-pay-salaries-google-amazon-2020-6">Big Tech salaries revealed: How much Apple, Tesla, Amazon, and 10 other tech giants pay their workers, from engineers to salespeople</a></strong></p><h2><strong>Condé Nast's video vetting</strong></h2><p><div type="image" title="conde nast video department racist sexist 2x1" height="1200" width="2400" msid="76800643" hostid="261"></div></p><p>I want to highlight three stories from the past week that build on previous reporting on Condé Nast, GMMB, and <keyword id="972977" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Crossfit">CrossFit</keyword>.</p><p>Rachel Premack talked to 13 current and former employees of Condé Nast Entertainment, the famed publisher's video-production entity, about the process through which videos are pitched and produced. From her story:</p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>Sources said this vetting process, which measures the various parts of a pitch against historical data, consistently rejected video pitches that would feature people of color and topics about nonwhite communities.</em></p><p>You can read the story in full here:</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/conde-nast-employees-racist-video-vetting-process-lizzo-megan-stallion-2020-7">Condé Nast employees say Black celebrities like Lizzo and Megan Thee Stallion were rejected from videos based on a 'racist' vetting process</a></strong></p><p>Sean Czarnecki talked to 26 current and former employees of GMMB, 15 of whom identify as people of color. From his story:</p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>While the firm touts its progressive work, these employees say the agency relegated employees of color to administrative work like office chores, failed to promote them equally, and tokenized them to win new business.</em></p><p>You can read the story in full here:</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gmmb-insiders-say-the-agency-has-systemic-racism-problem-2020-6">Insiders at Omnicom agency GMMB say the workplace is rife with 'systemic' racism, where people of color are tokenized and treated like 'the help'</a></strong></p><p>Lastly, Katie Warren and Gabby Landsverk reported:</p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>CrossFit founder Greg Glassman stepped down from his role as CEO on June 9 after one of his tweets was met with widespread backlash. Business Insider has obtained a 50-minute audio clip in which two people — a male and a female — can be heard talking. The woman has identified herself to Business Insider as Lisa Lugo, a former CrossFit employee. Three sources allege the male voice in the video is Glassman's. </em></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>In the clip, the man can be heard saying to Lugo, "It's enough for me to slit your f-----g throat."</em></p><p>You can read the story in full here:</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/crossfit-greg-glassman-audio-tape-clip-affiliate-summit-2020-6">A CrossFit employee who had a relationship with former CEO Greg Glassman says she has audio of him threatening her in a hotel room and saying: 'It's enough for me to slit your f-----g throat'</a></strong></p><h2><strong>The future of clean energy</strong></h2><p><div type="image" title="rising stars clean energy 2x1" height="1200" width="2400" msid="76800647" hostid="261"></div></p><p>From Benji Jones:</p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>An enormous transition is underway across the electric grid.</em></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>Power plants that run on fossil fuels are being replaced by solar panels and wind farms, while more batteries and electric vehicles are plugging in.</em></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>Once niche, the clean energy industry is going mainstream. Goldman Sachs says it's an investment opportunity worth as much as <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/renewable-energy-trillion-investment-opportunity-surpass-oil-first-time-goldman-2020-6-1029318482">$16 trillion through 2030</a>.</em></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>Within the industry, researchers, entrepreneurs, and workers are bringing a wide range of solutions to bear, from batteries that store energy in molten salt to water turbines that are fish-friendly.</em></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>Business Insider has identified the 21 emerging leaders in clean energy that we think everyone should know.</em></p><p>You can read the story in full here:</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-rising-stars-leaders-of-clean-energy-2020-6">Meet the 21 rising stars who are transforming the future of clean energy and taking on a $16 trillion opportunity</a></strong></p><p>Before I go, I want to highlight a couple of online events we have coming up. From finance editor Michelle Abrego:</p><p><em>One-click checkout startup Fast <a href="https://newsletter.businessinsider.com/click/20813649.36144/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYnVzaW5lc3NpbnNpZGVyLmNvbS9mYXN0LXBpdGNoLWRlY2stc2VyaWVzLWEtc3RyaXBlLXJhaXNlLTIwLW1pbGxpb24tMjAyMC01P25yX2VtYWlsX3JlZmVyZXI9MSZ1dG1fc291cmNlPVNhaWx0aHJ1JnV0bV9tZWRpdW09ZW1haWwmdXRtX2NvbnRlbnQ9V2FsbF9TdF9pbnNpZGVyIy0y/5cf96fe13f92a4520829381bB49752f4e" target="_blank" rel="noopener">raised its $20 million Series A</a> from investors including Index Ventures and buzzy fintech Stripe in May as it looks to take on Apple Pay to solve pain-points around password management and online checkout.</em></p><p><em>Join Business Insider reporter Shannen Balogh on Tuesday, July 14 at 1:30 p.m when she will speak with Domm Holland, Fast's cofounder and CEO, and Jan Hammer, general partner at Index Venture. They'll discuss how Holland came up with the idea for Fast, how to build a pitch deck, and what it takes to win over investors.</em></p><p><em><strong><a href="https://newsletter.businessinsider.com/click/20813649.36144/aHR0cHM6Ly91czAyd2ViLnpvb20udXMvd2ViaW5hci9yZWdpc3Rlci9XTl9YVGhPLU5RNlJlZUhLVnRLSnJQM2lnP25yX2VtYWlsX3JlZmVyZXI9MSZ1dG1fc291cmNlPVNhaWx0aHJ1JnV0bV9tZWRpdW09ZW1haWwmdXRtX2NvbnRlbnQ9V2FsbF9TdF9pbnNpZGVy/5cf96fe13f92a4520829381bB1f0910a6" target="_blank" rel="noopener">If you're a Business Insider subscriber, you can sign up here.</a></strong></em></p><p><em>You can also join Business Insider on July 8 at 12 p.m. ET for <strong>"Planning for the Future in Uncertain Times,"</strong> a free digital event and part of the Master Your Money series. Presented by Fidelity, it will explore components of a strong financial plan and how to adjust it given recent events. </em></p><p><em><strong><a href="https://newsletter.businessinsider.com/click/20813649.36144/aHR0cHM6Ly9ldmVudC5vbjI0LmNvbS9ldmVudFJlZ2lzdHJhdGlvbi9FdmVudExvYmJ5U2VydmxldD90YXJnZXQ9cmVnMzAuanNwJnBhcnRuZXJyZWY9ZWRpdG9yaWFsX25ld3NsZXR0ZXJfaW5jbHVzaW9uJmV2ZW50aWQ9MjQyMTQ4NSZzZXNzaW9uaWQ9MSZrZXk9Qjc3Q0EwNzFBQTEzQzVFQjVEQzQ0NUFGRDQwRjE4ODUmcmVnVGFnPSZzb3VyY2VwYWdlPXJlZ2lzdGVyJm5yX2VtYWlsX3JlZmVyZXI9MSZ1dG1fc291cmNlPVNhaWx0aHJ1JnV0bV9tZWRpdW09ZW1haWwmdXRtX2NvbnRlbnQ9V2FsbF9TdF9pbnNpZGVy/5cf96fe13f92a4520829381bB5003ecb2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Click here to register for the Master your Money event.</a></strong></em></p><p>Below are headlines on some of the stories you might have missed from the past week.</p><p>— Matt</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlsons-2024-presidential-campaign-seen-in-monologues-ratings-surge-2020-7">Tucker Carlson for president? GOP donors and conservative media are taking the idea seriously</a></strong></p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-stocks-to-buy-cloud-picks-top-analyst-brent-bracelin-2020-7">The most accurate tech analyst on Wall Street says these 6 stocks have potential for huge gains as they transform the sector</a></strong></p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/perella-weinberg-reshuffles-media-telecom-banking-unit-woody-young-chairman-2020-6">After flashy hires and a big buildout, Perella Weinberg's media and telecom team has been gutted. We tracked the exodus — and what it says about the landscape for blockbuster M&amp;A deals.</a></strong></p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-verily-alphabet-suspends-bonuses-redirects-diversity-efforts-leaked-memo-2020-6">LEAKED MEMO: Alphabet's healthcare unit Verily suspended bonuses mid-pandemic to fund diversity programs instead, frustrating employees</a></strong></p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-running-his-brokerage-from-home-swears-by-his-routine">Fredrik Eklund, the founder of a bicoastal team that signed $100 million in new contracts in one week, swears by this daily routine from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.</a></strong></p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/american-airlines-flight-attendants-leaked-memo-coronavirus-2020-7">Leaked memo reveals American Airlines needs to cut up to 8,000 flight-attendant jobs as the airline issues its first coronavirus layoff notices</a></strong></p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-third-party-sellers-ma-on-the-rise-2020-7">Some Amazon merchants are selling their businesses for more than $30 million as COVID-19 boosts the value of online retail: 'It's a seller's market'</a></strong></p><p><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-get-100k-career-cloud-computing-without-college-degree-2020-6">How to get a $100,000-plus career in cloud computing without a college degree, from a guy who did it and now coaches others</a></strong></p>

How much Apple, Tesla, Amazon, and 10 other tech giants pay their workers, from engineers to salespeople

<p>Matching output to demand is hard with wind and solar power. The answer is to store surplus juice on the grid until it is needed</p>
<p>ON OCTOBER 28th a battery factory opened in Concord, North Carolina. That was good for an area which has seen dark economic times, but the event made few headlines. Perhaps it should have made more, though, for this factory's owner, Alevo, a Swiss company, is not in the business of manufacturing cells for torches, mobile phones or even laptop computers. Rather, it is making batteries that can store serious amounts of electricity--megawatt-hours of it. And it plans to sell them to power-grid operators.</p>
<p>To start with, the new batteries will be used to smooth the consequences of irregular demand through the day by absorbing electricity during troughs and regurgitating it during peaks. If that pans out, it will eliminate the need for gas-powered "peaker" stations which fire up quickly when needed, but are expensive to run. It would also allow non-peaker stations to operate more efficiently. Alevo reckons that if a grid as big as America's Western interconnection (which supplies the west of the United States and Canada) were to use 18GW-worth of its batteries the grid could save $12 billion a year. Though the company has no North American contract yet, it does have an agreement to deploy its batteries in Guangdong, China.</p>
<p>Smoothing the operation of existing grids, however, may be only the beginning. In the longer run, optimists believe, batteries like these, or some equivalent technology, are the key to dealing with the problem not just of irregular demand, but of irregular supply. As the unit cost of solar and wind energy drops ever closer to that of power from fossil fuels, the fact that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine becomes more and more irksome. It is not just the great power-gap that is night which matters. As the chart below shows, even during the day--and even in deserts--the amount of sunlight can vary from minute to minute. And the wind, of course, is equally fickle.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Cheap grid-scale storage would overcome these irregularities. Renewables could then compete on cost alone. And there are many ideas for how to make this happen. Some, such as Alevo's, are ready to be sold. Others work in laboratories but have yet to be scaled up for use in the real world. Others still are little more than twinkles of varying plausibility in their inventors' eyes. But if even one of them is up to the task, then renewable energy may, at last, be able to stand on its own, rather than having to be subsidised and regulated into existence.</p>
<p>At the moment, grid-scale storage is dominated by pumped hydro. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, an American think-tank, 140GW-worth of this is installed around the world, with a capacity of 1.4TWhr. Pumped storage requires friendly geography. You need two reservoirs separated by a good gap of altitude. But it is then just a matter of linking them with pipes and using turbines that, if turned by falling water, generate electricity, but, when fed electricity, turn the other way to pump that water whence it came. Send it uphill when power is cheap, and let it flow down when there are spikes in demand, and you have a nice little business.</p>
<p>Not everywhere, though, has compliant hills and valleys. And pumped storage takes a long time, and a lot of money, to build. Technologies that start small, but can be scaled up as needed, are often a better answer.</p>
<h3>Batteries now included</h3>
<p>The immediate future of grid-scale storage, then, probably lies with real batteries rather than topographical ones. At least, Alevo thinks so. At full capacity, the firm's factory in Concord should be able to turn out 16.2GWhr-worth of them a year. And Alevo is not alone. Tesla is building an even bigger factory near Reno, Nevada (see "Brain scan: Tesla's electric man") to make batteries for its electric cars and for local and grid storage.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Several stations that use batteries to regulate the output of wind farms have already been built, or are under construction. In Sendai, Japan, Toshiba is creating one based on lithium-ion batteries. This should open in 2015. It will have a maximum power of 40MW, and will be able to run at that rate for half an hour. The Notrees Battery Storage Project, which opened in Texas in 2013, uses lead-acid batteries--sophisticated versions of the type found in petrol and diesel cars. It has a maximum power of 36MW and could run for 40 minutes at full tilt. Another Japanese project, of 34MW, in Rokkasho, uses sodium-sulphur batteries. And one in Alaska, of 27MW, uses nickel-cadmium ones.</p>
<p>As that list suggests, many types of grid-scale battery technology are available. Alevo uses electrodes made of lithium iron phosphate and graphite. These are connected by an inorganic sulphur-based electrolyte, a combination, the firm claims, that is particularly propitious because cycling between charged and discharged states produces only a 1°C change in the battery's temperature. This should eliminate the risk of overheating, to which some sorts of lithium-based cells are prone.</p>
<p>There are types of battery that actually require high temperatures to work. In sodium-sulphur cells of the sort deployed at Rokkasho both of those elements need to be liquid, meaning the battery has to be maintained at a temperature of 300-350°C. And an approach being developed by Donald Sadoway of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would use two sorts of liquid metal, separated by a liquid electrolyte. The clever thing about this design is that, by picking a dense metal such as a mixture of antimony and lead, a light one such as lithium, and an electrolyte whose density falls between the two, the three substances will float as separate layers in a container, rather as oil separates from vinegar in a salad dressing.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Despite their superficial differences, one thing all these batteries have in common is that the energy they contain is stored chemically within their electrodes. This has a consequence, at least for those with solid electrodes. The constant change in the electrodes' composition as they are charged and discharged gradually wears them out. This limited lifespan is one reason using batteries for grid-scale storage is still pricey. Indeed, Alevo's claim that its batteries can undergo more than 40,000 cycles of charging and discharging without noticeable loss of function is an important part of its sales pitch.</p>
<p>An alternative approach, known as a flow battery, does not suffer from this difficulty. A flow battery's energy is stored in its electrolytes (of which there are two, separated by a membrane), rather than its electrodes (see illustration 1). Not only does that stop the electrodes wearing out, it also means that there is no upper limit, based on the sizes of those electrodes, on how much energy such a battery can store. Its capacity depends instead on the size of the tanks used to hold the electrolytes.</p>
<p>Flow batteries are a much less developed technology than standard batteries, but they are beginning to become commercially available. Many of those on sale at the moment (by firms such as Gildemeister of Germany and UET of Washington state) use vanadium-based electrolytes. Vanadium is a good material because its multiple ionic states mean it can be used to store energy without having to involve other reagents, and thus complicate the design.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, vanadium is expensive. But systems that use cheaper materials are being developed. Several firms are trying zinc and bromine in electrolytes and others iron and chromium. Ideas still in the lab include flow batteries based on cheap organic compounds called anthraquinones. If these prove robust enough to commercialise, they will be strong competitors in the grid-scale storage market. But they will not be alone. For batteries are not the only route to the destination.</p>
<h3>Pumped up</h3>
<p>If the engineers at Gravity Power in Goleta, California, get their way, even pumped storage is in line for a makeover. Their approach, it should be said from the outset, is one of the most twinkly of the twinkling eyes in the field. Even if it ultimately fails it shows the originality of thought that is being brought to bear on the problem.</p>
<p>Instead of two large reservoirs at different altitudes on a hillside, Gravity Power proposes two water-filled cylindrical shafts--one wider than the other--dug into the ground (see illustration 2). The shafts will be linked top and bottom to form a circuit, with a combined pump-turbine, similar to the ones used in conventional pumped storage, in the upper link. The wider shaft will contain a huge cylinder, made either of the rock the shaft is cut through or of concrete, to act as a piston.</p>
<p>When the pump-turbine is opened, the piston sinks, driving water around the circuit and through the turbine, generating power. Spin the device the other way using electricity, and the reversed water flow pushes the piston up again.</p>
<p>How much energy this arrangement can store depends on how deep the shafts go. And that is where it gets tricky, for some serious civil engineering will be needed if the idea is to work. Gravity Power proposes the shafts descend hundreds of metres. This will require large thicknesses of suitable rock--in practice this will probably be limestone, which is soft enough to cut into--so deployment will be limited not so much by geography as geology. And making a good seal between piston and shaft will hardly be trivial. So it will be expensive. A unit 700 metres deep, with a main shaft 26 metres across and a return shaft (or penstock) of about a tenth of that, would cost $170m. It would, though, be able to store about 200MWhr of energy, with an output of 50MW. Building one that size is years away, but the firm hopes to start work in 2015 on a demonstration plant near Penzberg, in Germany, with a depth of 140 metres, a capacity of 500 kWhr and an output of 1MW.</p>
<p>Nor is Gravity Power's approach the only one to rely on underground spaces and friendly geology. Another is to fill a subterranean cavern with compressed air. For that, the cavern needs to be hermetically sealed and this means using an underground salt dome that has been hollowed out by solution mining (ie, the salt has been extracted with hot water).</p>
<p>Given such a cavern, compressed-air storage is a bit like classical pumped storage, except with a gas, rather than a liquid. Air is pumped into the cavern, increasing its pressure, and then let out to drive a turbine. But there is a catch: gases heat up when compressed and cool when they expand. For compressed-air storage to work, therefore, the air released from the cavern has to be heated (usually by burning natural gas), otherwise it would freeze the turbine. That makes compressed-air storage inefficient--one reason there are only two grid-scale examples of it in the world (one in Germany, the other in Alabama).</p>
<p>This would change if the heat of compression could be captured, stored and recycled. And that is the goal of LightSail Energy, a firm based in Berkeley, California. LightSail has developed a small, but still grid-scale, compressed-air system that sprays water into the compression chamber, to cool the air as its volume shrinks. The air is then stored in a set of tanks with a total volume of 42,000 litres, and the water, with its heat load, is put into two tanks that have, in total, about a quarter of the volume of the air tanks.</p>
<p>At the moment, this device can store 700kWhr of energy, but that should rise to 1.1MWhr when (as is the plan) it is pressurised to 300 atmospheres instead of the current 200. That is a fraction more than one of Alevo's battery packs, which store 1MWhr. For comparison, the Alabama salt dome can store 2.9GWhr.</p>
<p>If heat is to be stored at scale some inventors would prefer to simplify the process, get rid of the compressed air, and concentrate on sequestering the heat itself. Isentropic, a company in Fareham, Britain, plans to employ the compression and expansion of a gas (in this case, argon) to create heat and cold respectively in two large containers of gravel--one of the cheapest solid heat-storage media imaginable. Once again, a pump-turbine is involved. It does the compression and expansion when electricity is abundant, and when it is scarce the gas flow, and thus the heat flow and therefore the whole process, is reversed.</p>
<p>Nor are these ideas the end of the list. Several firms, from giants such as ABB of Zurich, to minnows such as Berkeley Energy Sciences, a neighbour of LightSail, are pushing giant flywheels as at least part of the answer. Another suggestion--for filling in the shortest irregularities in supply, those lasting a few seconds or minutes such as are caused by the passage of a cloud in front of the sun--is to use supercapacitors, which store electricity as an actual electric charge, rather than converting it into chemical or physical potential energy of a non-electric form. At the other end of the scale as far as the size of the gap in supply is concerned, namely the nocturnal hours when solar energy cannot operate, several research groups are trying to use molten salts (usually sodium and potassium nitrates) to store heat gathered during the day and then, at night, raise steam for generators with it.</p>
<p>And there is one further idea around that, though it relies on new storage technology being developed, does not rely on that technology being developed specifically for grid-scale storage. This is to use the fleet of electric cars that its proposers hope will take over from ones driven by internal-combustion engines over the course of the next couple of decades.</p>
<p>In the imaginations of such people, the batteries of these cars (which would, when idle, be attached to the grid in order to charge them), could be employed as a giant storage network, to be plundered with the car owners' permission at times of peak demand. It is an intriguing thought--but the overlap between those times and the times cars are most likely to be on the road might scupper it in practice. As might the answer to the question about how ubiquitous electric cars will actually become. For that will depend on the future success and affordability of batteries.</p>
<p>The path from startup to success is littered with corpses, and an awful lot of business models depend for their putative profit on what is, according to your point of view, either a subsidy or a factoring in of the economic externalities (in the form of climate change) imposed by fossil fuels. In particular, Germany's Energiewende and California's Renewable Energy Programme have, by requiring a large fraction of those jurisdictions' electricity to be renewable, helped fuel the boom.</p>
<h3>Your bill, sir</h3>
<p>The world would no doubt be a better place if the externalities imposed by fossil fuels were properly accounted for in the price of electricity. But that is a hard sell, not least because of disagreements about those externalities' true size. In the meantime, it is better if grid-scale storage can be rolled out without taxpayer support.</p>
<p>That is the main reason for watching the example of Alevo. It says it can make money even in unsubsidised grids, because it has been ruthless about reducing manufacturing costs and simplifying the technology as far as possible.</p>
<p>This is a businesslike approach. If it works, and others prove able to mimic it, then the cost of running a grid, and thus the price of electricity, will fall. That alone will be a good thing. But success will change the very nature of such a grid, enabling it to absorb more wind and solar power even if this is a consequence unintended by the grid owners. How much more is yet unknown, for fossil fuels (particularly natural gas) are getting cheaper too. But renewables will no longer be fighting the battle with one hand tied behind their back.</p>
<p>The world would no doubt be a better place if the externalities imposed by fossil fuels were properly accounted for in the price of electricity</p>
<p>Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to The Economist</p>
<p></p>

We've Almost Solved the Biggest Problem With Solar And Wind

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Matching output to demand is hard with wind and solar power. The answer is to store surplus juice on the grid until it is needed</p>
<p>ON OCTOBER 28th a battery factory opened in Concord, North Carolina. That was good for an area which has seen dark economic times, but the event made few headlines. Perhaps it should have made more, though, for this factory's owner, Alevo, a Swiss company, is not in the business of manufacturing cells for torches, mobile phones or even laptop computers. Rather, it is making batteries that can store serious amounts of electricity--megawatt-hours of it. And it plans to sell them to power-grid operators.</p>
<p>To start with, the new batteries will be used to smooth the consequences of irregular demand through the day by absorbing electricity during troughs and regurgitating it during peaks. If that pans out, it will eliminate the need for gas-powered "peaker" stations which fire up quickly when needed, but are expensive to run. It would also allow non-peaker stations to operate more efficiently. Alevo reckons that if a grid as big as America's Western interconnection (which supplies the west of the United States and Canada) were to use 18GW-worth of its batteries the grid could save $12 billion a year. Though the company has no North American contract yet, it does have an agreement to deploy its batteries in Guangdong, China.</p>
<p>Smoothing the operation of existing grids, however, may be only the beginning. In the longer run, optimists believe, batteries like these, or some equivalent technology, are the key to dealing with the problem not just of irregular demand, but of irregular supply. As the unit cost of solar and wind energy drops ever closer to that of power from fossil fuels, the fact that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine becomes more and more irksome. It is not just the great power-gap that is night which matters. As the chart below shows, even during the day--and even in deserts--the amount of sunlight can vary from minute to minute. And the wind, of course, is equally fickle.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div>Cheap grid-scale storage would overcome these irregularities. Renewables could then compete on cost alone. And there are many ideas for how to make this happen. Some, such as Alevo's, are ready to be sold. Others work in laboratories but have yet to be scaled up for use in the real world. Others still are little more than twinkles of varying plausibility in their inventors' eyes. But if even one of them is up to the task, then renewable energy may, at last, be able to stand on its own, rather than having to be subsidised and regulated into existence.</p>
<p>At the moment, grid-scale storage is dominated by pumped hydro. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, an American think-tank, 140GW-worth of this is installed around the world, with a capacity of 1.4TWhr. Pumped storage requires friendly geography. You need two reservoirs separated by a good gap of altitude. But it is then just a matter of linking them with pipes and using turbines that, if turned by falling water, generate electricity, but, when fed electricity, turn the other way to pump that water whence it came. Send it uphill when power is cheap, and let it flow down when there are spikes in demand, and you have a nice little business.</p>
<p>Not everywhere, though, has compliant hills and valleys. And pumped storage takes a long time, and a lot of money, to build. Technologies that start small, but can be scaled up as needed, are often a better answer.</p>
<h3>Batteries now included</h3>
<p>The immediate future of grid-scale storage, then, probably lies with real batteries rather than topographical ones. At least, Alevo thinks so. At full capacity, the firm's factory in Concord should be able to turn out 16.2GWhr-worth of them a year. And Alevo is not alone. Tesla is building an even bigger factory near Reno, Nevada (see "Brain scan: Tesla's electric man") to make batteries for its electric cars and for local and grid storage.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Several stations that use batteries to regulate the output of wind farms have already been built, or are under construction. In Sendai, Japan, Toshiba is creating one based on lithium-ion batteries. This should open in 2015. It will have a maximum power of 40MW, and will be able to run at that rate for half an hour. The Notrees Battery Storage Project, which opened in Texas in 2013, uses lead-acid batteries--sophisticated versions of the type found in petrol and diesel cars. It has a maximum power of 36MW and could run for 40 minutes at full tilt. Another Japanese project, of 34MW, in Rokkasho, uses sodium-sulphur batteries. And one in Alaska, of 27MW, uses nickel-cadmium ones.</p>
<p>As that list suggests, many types of grid-scale battery technology are available. Alevo uses electrodes made of lithium iron phosphate and graphite. These are connected by an inorganic sulphur-based electrolyte, a combination, the firm claims, that is particularly propitious because cycling between charged and discharged states produces only a 1°C change in the battery's temperature. This should eliminate the risk of overheating, to which some sorts of lithium-based cells are prone.</p>
<p>There are types of battery that actually require high temperatures to work. In sodium-sulphur cells of the sort deployed at Rokkasho both of those elements need to be liquid, meaning the battery has to be maintained at a temperature of 300-350°C. And an approach being developed by Donald Sadoway of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would use two sorts of liquid metal, separated by a liquid electrolyte. The clever thing about this design is that, by picking a dense metal such as a mixture of antimony and lead, a light one such as lithium, and an electrolyte whose density falls between the two, the three substances will float as separate layers in a container, rather as oil separates from vinegar in a salad dressing.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Despite their superficial differences, one thing all these batteries have in common is that the energy they contain is stored chemically within their electrodes. This has a consequence, at least for those with solid electrodes. The constant change in the electrodes' composition as they are charged and discharged gradually wears them out. This limited lifespan is one reason using batteries for grid-scale storage is still pricey. Indeed, Alevo's claim that its batteries can undergo more than 40,000 cycles of charging and discharging without noticeable loss of function is an important part of its sales pitch.</p>
<p>An alternative approach, known as a flow battery, does not suffer from this difficulty. A flow battery's energy is stored in its electrolytes (of which there are two, separated by a membrane), rather than its electrodes (see illustration 1). Not only does that stop the electrodes wearing out, it also means that there is no upper limit, based on the sizes of those electrodes, on how much energy such a battery can store. Its capacity depends instead on the size of the tanks used to hold the electrolytes.</p>
<p>Flow batteries are a much less developed technology than standard batteries, but they are beginning to become commercially available. Many of those on sale at the moment (by firms such as Gildemeister of Germany and UET of Washington state) use vanadium-based electrolytes. Vanadium is a good material because its multiple ionic states mean it can be used to store energy without having to involve other reagents, and thus complicate the design.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, vanadium is expensive. But systems that use cheaper materials are being developed. Several firms are trying zinc and bromine in electrolytes and others iron and chromium. Ideas still in the lab include flow batteries based on cheap organic compounds called anthraquinones. If these prove robust enough to commercialise, they will be strong competitors in the grid-scale storage market. But they will not be alone. For batteries are not the only route to the destination.</p>
<h3>Pumped up</h3>
<p>If the engineers at Gravity Power in Goleta, California, get their way, even pumped storage is in line for a makeover. Their approach, it should be said from the outset, is one of the most twinkly of the twinkling eyes in the field. Even if it ultimately fails it shows the originality of thought that is being brought to bear on the problem.</p>
<p>Instead of two large reservoirs at different altitudes on a hillside, Gravity Power proposes two water-filled cylindrical shafts--one wider than the other--dug into the ground (see illustration 2). The shafts will be linked top and bottom to form a circuit, with a combined pump-turbine, similar to the ones used in conventional pumped storage, in the upper link. The wider shaft will contain a huge cylinder, made either of the rock the shaft is cut through or of concrete, to act as a piston.</p>
<p>When the pump-turbine is opened, the piston sinks, driving water around the circuit and through the turbine, generating power. Spin the device the other way using electricity, and the reversed water flow pushes the piston up again.</p>
<p>How much energy this arrangement can store depends on how deep the shafts go. And that is where it gets tricky, for some serious civil engineering will be needed if the idea is to work. Gravity Power proposes the shafts descend hundreds of metres. This will require large thicknesses of suitable rock--in practice this will probably be limestone, which is soft enough to cut into--so deployment will be limited not so much by geography as geology. And making a good seal between piston and shaft will hardly be trivial. So it will be expensive. A unit 700 metres deep, with a main shaft 26 metres across and a return shaft (or penstock) of about a tenth of that, would cost $170m. It would, though, be able to store about 200MWhr of energy, with an output of 50MW. Building one that size is years away, but the firm hopes to start work in 2015 on a demonstration plant near Penzberg, in Germany, with a depth of 140 metres, a capacity of 500 kWhr and an output of 1MW.</p>
<p>Nor is Gravity Power's approach the only one to rely on underground spaces and friendly geology. Another is to fill a subterranean cavern with compressed air. For that, the cavern needs to be hermetically sealed and this means using an underground salt dome that has been hollowed out by solution mining (ie, the salt has been extracted with hot water).</p>
<p>Given such a cavern, compressed-air storage is a bit like classical pumped storage, except with a gas, rather than a liquid. Air is pumped into the cavern, increasing its pressure, and then let out to drive a turbine. But there is a catch: gases heat up when compressed and cool when they expand. For compressed-air storage to work, therefore, the air released from the cavern has to be heated (usually by burning natural gas), otherwise it would freeze the turbine. That makes compressed-air storage inefficient--one reason there are only two grid-scale examples of it in the world (one in Germany, the other in Alabama).</p>
<p>This would change if the heat of compression could be captured, stored and recycled. And that is the goal of LightSail Energy, a firm based in Berkeley, California. LightSail has developed a small, but still grid-scale, compressed-air system that sprays water into the compression chamber, to cool the air as its volume shrinks. The air is then stored in a set of tanks with a total volume of 42,000 litres, and the water, with its heat load, is put into two tanks that have, in total, about a quarter of the volume of the air tanks.</p>
<p>At the moment, this device can store 700kWhr of energy, but that should rise to 1.1MWhr when (as is the plan) it is pressurised to 300 atmospheres instead of the current 200. That is a fraction more than one of Alevo's battery packs, which store 1MWhr. For comparison, the Alabama salt dome can store 2.9GWhr.</p>
<p>If heat is to be stored at scale some inventors would prefer to simplify the process, get rid of the compressed air, and concentrate on sequestering the heat itself. Isentropic, a company in Fareham, Britain, plans to employ the compression and expansion of a gas (in this case, argon) to create heat and cold respectively in two large containers of gravel--one of the cheapest solid heat-storage media imaginable. Once again, a pump-turbine is involved. It does the compression and expansion when electricity is abundant, and when it is scarce the gas flow, and thus the heat flow and therefore the whole process, is reversed.</p>
<p>Nor are these ideas the end of the list. Several firms, from giants such as ABB of Zurich, to minnows such as Berkeley Energy Sciences, a neighbour of LightSail, are pushing giant flywheels as at least part of the answer. Another suggestion--for filling in the shortest irregularities in supply, those lasting a few seconds or minutes such as are caused by the passage of a cloud in front of the sun--is to use supercapacitors, which store electricity as an actual electric charge, rather than converting it into chemical or physical potential energy of a non-electric form. At the other end of the scale as far as the size of the gap in supply is concerned, namely the nocturnal hours when solar energy cannot operate, several research groups are trying to use molten salts (usually sodium and potassium nitrates) to store heat gathered during the day and then, at night, raise steam for generators with it.</p>
<p>And there is one further idea around that, though it relies on new storage technology being developed, does not rely on that technology being developed specifically for grid-scale storage. This is to use the fleet of electric cars that its proposers hope will take over from ones driven by internal-combustion engines over the course of the next couple of decades.</p>
<p>In the imaginations of such people, the batteries of these cars (which would, when idle, be attached to the grid in order to charge them), could be employed as a giant storage network, to be plundered with the car owners' permission at times of peak demand. It is an intriguing thought--but the overlap between those times and the times cars are most likely to be on the road might scupper it in practice. As might the answer to the question about how ubiquitous electric cars will actually become. For that will depend on the future success and affordability of batteries.</p>
<p>The path from startup to success is littered with corpses, and an awful lot of business models depend for their putative profit on what is, according to your point of view, either a subsidy or a factoring in of the economic externalities (in the form of climate change) imposed by fossil fuels. In particular, Germany's Energiewende and California's Renewable Energy Programme have, by requiring a large fraction of those jurisdictions' electricity to be renewable, helped fuel the boom.</p>
<h3>Your bill, sir</h3>
<p>The world would no doubt be a better place if the externalities imposed by fossil fuels were properly accounted for in the price of electricity. But that is a hard sell, not least because of disagreements about those externalities' true size. In the meantime, it is better if grid-scale storage can be rolled out without taxpayer support.</p>
<p>That is the main reason for watching the example of Alevo. It says it can make money even in unsubsidised grids, because it has been ruthless about reducing manufacturing costs and simplifying the technology as far as possible.</p>
<p>This is a businesslike approach. If it works, and others prove able to mimic it, then the cost of running a grid, and thus the price of electricity, will fall. That alone will be a good thing. But success will change the very nature of such a grid, enabling it to absorb more wind and solar power even if this is a consequence unintended by the grid owners. How much more is yet unknown, for fossil fuels (particularly natural gas) are getting cheaper too. But renewables will no longer be fighting the battle with one hand tied behind their back.</p>
<p><br id="__tmp">The world would no doubt be a better place if the externalities imposed by fossil fuels were properly accounted for in the price of electricity</br></p>
<p>Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to The Economist</p>
<p></p>

Grid-Scale Storage: Smooth Operators

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Thomson Reuters</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Our climate is changing. There's <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/04/15/research-shows-yet-again-that-theres-no-scientific-debate-about-climate-change">no scientific debate about this</a>.</p><p>In fact, in 2016 - <a href="http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=wAAAAAAAMBAJ&amp;pg=51">decades</a> after scientists first warned of the sharp changes necessary to stop global warming - it's more accurate to say our climate <em>has changed</em>.</p><p>"There's no stopping global warming," Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist who is the director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-100-years-2016-8">recently told my colleague Sarah Kramer</a>. "Everything that's happened so far is baked into the system."</p><p>At this point, the real question is: What are we going to do about it?</p><p>Hillary Clinton, the person who <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/quinnipiac-poll-clinton-trump-landslide-2016-8">appears most likely to become our next president</a>, has adopted a plan to reduce US emissions - the heat-trapping gases we pump into the air when we generate power - 80% by 2050 into her campaign platform. The Obama administration made it the country's stated aspiration at the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/paris-climate-agreement-approved-2015-12">2016 international Paris Agreement to combat climate change</a>.</p><p>So that raises a second question: Is this something we could actually pull off in the next 34 years?</p><p>In public policy, a good way to answer that question is to ask if we could afford it. Geoffrey Heal, a Columbia University environmental economist, recently published a <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w22525">paper</a> examining what it would actually cost to meet that target.</p><p>Here's what he found.</p><h2>There are limits to our ability to predict the future</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Apple</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>The big headline number from Heal's paper is $42 billion to $176 billion per year every year between now and 2050.</p><p>That's not an exact figure plucked from a crystal ball, Heal told Business Insider, but more of a "rough estimate," or a figure that's in the right order of magnitude but "not claiming to be correct to three significant figures or anything like that."</p><p>Still, it's a useful measure for thinking about Clinton's target, said Heal. And to get there, he relied on a few assumptions:</p><ul><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Solar and wind energy will drive the vast majority of the shift to emissions-free energy.</span></li><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Those technologies will improve and grow cheaper in predictable ways.</span></li><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No major new technologies will upend the energy market in the next few decades.</span></li></ul><p>In the best-case scenario, Heal found that the US could probably wring an 80% drop in emissions out of about $1.28 trillion dollars over the course of 34 years. In the worst case scenario, about $5.28 trillion.</p><p>Those numbers include the costs of the photovoltaic panels, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/stunning-images-worlds-largest-solar-power-plant-2015-11">molten salt towers</a>, and wind farms necessary to generate enough clean energy to cover two-thirds of total US demand. But they also factor in the giant batteries and high-voltage interstate power lines which Heal said would also be necessary to help the country cope with a shift to power sources that only generate energy some of the time.</p><h2>So is that a lot of money?</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Paramount</span></p><p class="caption">A still from the 1990 movie 'The Hunt for Red October,' which may or may not be a 100% accurate representation of the Cold War. The Cold War may have cost as much as $8 trillion.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>When Heal set out to arrive at his figure, he wasn't sure what he'd find. "I was genuinely curious whether this would be a financial ruinous proposition or whether it would be something we could live with," Heal said.</p><p>All told, $1.28 trillion (or $42 billion per year) would make an 80% emissions reduction about <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/15/-for-us-cost-1tn.html">33% more expensive than the war in Afghanistan</a> - though spread over more than twice as much time - but just <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314">two-thirds the cost of the war in Iraq</a>. By another measure: <a href="http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1579/1">about 12 Apollo programs</a> or <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/financial-stability/reports/Documents/TARP%20Four%20Year%20Retrospective%20Report.pdf">two 2008 TARP bank bailouts</a>.</p><p>That places the goal squarely in the territory of things the United States could achieve, given enough political will. Still, it would definitely be limited to the just-a-few-times-a-century category, said Heal.</p><p>But let's say things go another way, and the final cost looks more like the $5.28 trillion ($176 billion per year) Heal projects at the high end. Now we're talking about a project 25% more expensive than <a href="https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22926.pdf">defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan</a> - though, again, spread out over a much longer period - or two-and-a-half Iraq Wars.</p><p>A better way to think about this, though, is in annual terms. Right now, yearly gross domestic product in the US is about <a href="http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm">$18.4 trillion</a>. Everything we know about finance and history tells us that number will grow significantly in the next 34 years. But right now, a $42 billion annual program would be about 0.2% of GDP. And a $176 billion annual program would cost about 1% of GDP.</p><p>That places the annual cost of an 80% emissions reduction somewhere between <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/content/reach-for-new-heights-nasa-budget-unveiled-for-fiscal-year-2016">two NASAs</a> and <a href="http://www.saffm.hq.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-160209-036.pdf">the US Air Force</a>.</p><p>So is that a lot of money?</p><p>"I guess the conclusion that I've come to is that it's expensive but not ruinous," Heal said.</p><h2>Most of the spending would come from private investors</h2><p>It's important to understand here that when Heal talks about the cost of the 80% reduction he's not talking about tax dollars.</p><p data-l10n-id="">"This is not something the government can do," Heal said. "This is private sector investment in infrastructure, basically."</p><p data-l10n-id="">Historically, the role of government has been to wield carrots and sticks. Most of these lie in the tax code, and have been shown to be fairly effective in guiding investors to projects the government is excited about.</p><p data-l10n-id="">Credits for producing renewable energy or buying electric cars would fall into the carrot category, explained Heal. Sticks would look like a carbon tax or massive hike to the gasoline tax.</p><h2>Whether or not the plan succeeds, we're likely to see the creation of a major new American industry</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>In Heal's calculations, the single most significant variable was energy storage.</p><p>That's because solar and wind, the likely sources of clean energy in an low-emission America, rely on intermittent power sources. That's a fancy way of saying that sometimes it's night time or not very windy out.</p><p>Right now, the grid mostly solves this problem by importing traditional power to fill in the gaps left by solar and wind production. But if you're trying to go really clean, said Heal, that's not an option.</p><p>So a national low-emissions energy grid would need to do two things well:</p><ul><li>Move electricity over vast distances, so that if one state has a low-energy day, another can lend a hand.</li><li>Store surplus power generated on good days to fill in the gaps on bad ones.</li></ul><p>The first problem is fairly simple to solve, Heal said. Right now, the US grid is actually lots of little grids. But linking them up is mostly a matter of laying some high-voltage power lines. Not cheap, but a fairly straightforward upgrade to make to our existing infrastructure.</p><p>The second problem though is more complicated. We don't yet know how much power a national clean-energy grid could put out in a day, or how reliably long-distance sharing can make up for local shortfalls. That means we have very little idea how much power we have to sock away on good days to prepare for slow ones in a clean grid, said Heal.</p><p>"It's something we just haven't thought about because it hasn't been that relevant until now," Heal said.</p><p>For purposes of his calculations, Heal assumed we'll need the capacity to store about two days' of renewable power. ("This figure has no rigorous scientific basis," he wrote in the paper, "but seems to pass a 'laugh test.'")</p><p>Storage raises a second, technological question.</p><p>Right now our best large-scale, long-term power storage option is pretty crude: We can pump vast amounts of water up a hill on a good day, then let it run downhill on a bad day to turn a hydroelectric turbine. But Heal writes that most of the good sites for this method are already in use, and can only store a fraction of the total energy we'll need. Home batteries from companies like <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/mercedes-battery-is-smaller-than-teslas-powerwall-2016-5">Tesla and Mercedes</a> can handle a bit more of the load. But it looks like we're going to need massive, grid-scale batteries to get a clean power system working round the clock.</p><p>The thing is, these don't exist yet. No one yet knows how much they'll cost, which battery technologies they'll use, or who will build them.</p><p>We do know that they're likely to become a major industry though. Depending on the amount of storage we end up needing and the technologies involved, Heal estimates we'll spend between $2.2 trillion and $5.1 trillion on these monsters over the next 34 years.</p><p>(On the plus side, we'll save about $960 billion on fuel, which is why the final price tag of a clean grid is so much lower.)</p><h2>It might be time to think about nuclear again</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>REUTERS/Charles Platiau</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>One interesting finding from Heal's calculations is that the cheapest route to an 80% lower emissions electric grid might involve nuclear power.</p><p>Though nuclear power plants have a scary reputation, they only emit water vapor. And they work round-the-clock, regardless of weather. With enough new facilities, Heal found we'd only need to replace about half of US power generation with wind and solar rather than two-thirds, and the cost of storage would drop significantly.</p><p>"That was a calculation I found surprising," Heal said, "because nuclear is something that's regarded as very expensive and it's effectively priced itself out of the market these days."</p><p>Though nuclear power plants provide about 20% of US electricity, the last one to come online in the US was <a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=228&amp;t=21">Tennessee's Watts Bar facility</a> in 1996. (Early preparations for Watts Bar 2 <a href="https://www.tva.com/Newsroom/Watts-Bar-2-Project">began this year</a>.) At the same time, <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601533/nuclear-shutdowns-could-ramp-up-us-carbon-emissions/">as many as 20 aging plants</a> could shut down in the next decade.</p><p>The Obama administration has broadly signaled its support for nuclear. But the <keyword id="6358883" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Politics">politics</keyword> of fission power are dicey at best, and it's easy to imagine a major nuclear power push struggling to get off the ground.</p><h2>Heal's calculations may miss a key variable</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Thomson Reuters</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Economists are good at making judgments about cost and efficiency, but struggle to account for squishy human foibles like politics and short-term thinking.</p><p>Heal's paper assumes society will work in a concerted, directed way to address climate change. That, for example, people will continue to move toward electric cars even if gas prices remain under $3/gallon.</p><p>This isn't always how things work.</p><p>Myron Ebell, an energy and environmental policy analyst (and avowed climate <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> skeptic) with the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, said a program on the scale Heal envisions would struggle to get off the ground.</p><p>"I think Obama has gone about as far as you can go in terms of twisting the current regulatory structure to try to do things," Ebell said.</p><p>"At some point Congress would have to vote for this kind of program, and I think it's a long way in the future if at all. I have my doubts that it will ever happen, but right now you can say it's several Congresses away."</p><p>Ebell said that political "friction" - from opponents ranging from national lawmakers to local landowners objecting to power lines and windmills - will likely add costs at every stage of a major national energy overhaul.</p><p>Heal agrees that politics and planning could be a major hurdle.</p><p>"I don't think anyone has thought through in any detail what it would take to mobilize the amount of money that we're talking about here," he said.</p><p>"It's a question of providing a structure through which [investors] feel comfortable making these commitments, because they're huge commitments... We'd need a carefully thought out policy, establishing some clear expectation of continuity in the field over quite a long period of time."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-nye-donald-trump-climate-change-2016-7">Bill Nye has a great response to Trump's outrageous statements about climate change</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="M4ZGhhMDE6V_TTVkQAEVKXwwmp1YmmLN" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

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