In August 2020, Texas' largest battery storage system, the Upton County 10 million-megawatt battery storage project, was dubbed an "all around success" by an independent auditor almost two years into the system's operation.
In a report by Energy Storage News, Steve Panagiotou, commercial operations director of the battery system's integrator, FlexGen, said that the system's performance "gives utilities the confidence to continue investing in a future with state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery storage."
The future of lithium-ion battery storage, however, might not be as utopian as it seems, some argue.
Charles McConnell, executive director for Carbon Management at the Center for Carbon Management in Energy (CCME) at the University of Houston, said that a reliable U.S. domestic source for lithium-ion battery materials is decades away.
Battery storage is suitable for energy needs of minutes or hours or one day long at most, McConnell said. Reliable, sustainable storage for grid interruptions and outages of more than one day is the primary concern. The amount of storage required to support the state's and the country's electrical grid for anything more than a day would be exponential.
"The idea that we will be able to mobilize, deploy and have significant battery storage for interruptions and outages in a grid system, I don't think is an achievable idea in any event," McConnell told Lone Star Standard.
He explained that as the energy transition continues other storage methods, such as hydrogen and decarbonized natural-gas-based electricity, must be considered in order to have energy backups when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't gusting.
"We will need base-load capacity, and many people today would believe that to try to achieve anything much beyond 50% of the capacity necessary in an electrical system with simply renewables is really an unrealistic target," McConnell said.
Although a fair amount of battery storage is available in Texas, he said it covers only a tiny portion of the state's energy storage needs.
"I think people need to recognize that we are incredibly far away from a 100% renewable source of energy that could be 'backed up' by batteries or, frankly, any other additional storage," he said.
Another challenge posed to the prospect of supporting the state and national electrical grid with batteries is the ethical concerns behind the harvesting of cobalt and other materials in lithium-ion batteries. McConnell said if Americans are upset about the human rights concerns behind blood diamonds and the unethical mining of the gems in Africa, the same unease should be applied to the rare earth material sourcing for lithium-batteries by mostly Chinese-controlled entities.
"[The sourcing of] all these rare earths and minerals in places like Africa and Congo is done in a manner in which we would never accept in our country," McConnell said. "Whether that's an environmental footprint, a human rights footprint, or both, it's a conundrum here."
In 2016, the Washington Post reported on the cobalt mining conditions in the African nation of Congo. The mineral was being seized by big tech companies across the globe for its essential role in the production of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, resulting in entire populations mining cobalt in harsh, laborious and dangerous conditions. Hundreds of feet below ground, mining cobalt by hand with little safety protocols and oversight, miners were commonly subject to metal poisoning, breathing problems, injury and death.
The company controlling the mines was Chinese, Zheijiang Huayou Cobalt. According to the Post, Apple Inc. acknowledged that cobalt from these unethically conditioned Chinese-controlled mines was present in at least 20% of Apple technology.
The Congo cobalt mine conditions had not improved by 2018, when CBS News investigated child labor in Congo.
According to the report, cobalt sourced by child labor in the Congo is used in devices from numerous tech giants, including Samsung, Apple, Microsoft and Tesla.
"The work is hard enough for an adult man but it is unthinkable for a child," CBS News reported. "Yet tens of thousands of Congolese kids are involved in every stage of mining for cobalt. The latest research by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates 40,000 children are working in [Congolese] mines."
American efforts to grab the reigns of this unhinged battery material market are under way.
In a February 2020 article from Utility Drive, manufacturers such as GM, Ford and Tesla have announced plans to produce U.S.-made batteries for electric vehicles over the next several years. The article said the lack of American domestic lithium and battery production is a critical issue, noting that China controls more than 80% of the rare-earth battery material global supply chain.
In terms of looking to the future and energy transition, McConnell echoed the articles' affirmation that change in the sourcing of battery material is necessary and imminent. He said energy sustainability needs to be affordable, reliable and environmentally responsible.
"We are expecting that these materials will magically show up from somewhere else in quantities far beyond what is currently produced in the world," he said.
From the dream of prolonged energy storage in batteries to sustain the electrical grid to increasing manufacturer promises of all-electric cars, McConnell said that material demands far surpass material availability.
With the global demand for energy projected to double in the next 30 years, McConnell still believes that renewable energy sources are incredibly important. Other energy sources will not be eliminated, however, as the worldwide demand to electrify increases.
For this reason, the CCME director said that exploration into decarbonization and emission reduction is as important as climate change and renewable energy.
"I believe there are incredibly powerful decarbonization technologies necessary to deploy on natural gas-based electricity generation, perhaps on coal-based electricity generation, perhaps on the whole hydrocarbon industry in and of itself," McConnell said. "It definitely needs to be decarbonized."
Although self-described as neither anti-battery nor anti-renewables, and not a "fossil guy" either, McConnell wants Texas and the nation to remember that the idea of supporting entire state, national and global populations with renewable energy and battery storage any time in the foreseeable future is misplaced from reality.
With less than 10% of the world's energy coming from wind or solar sources it adds to the urgency to allocate time and resources to carbon management.
"What we need to do is embrace all of the aspects of carbon management and decarbonization that's necessary," McConnell said. "That's how we're going to solve the problem, not by simply picking something as a magical solution, like batteries.
"I believe there's a series of carbon management challenges we have as a society that we better embrace in its totality, in terms of lowering emissions because that's the ticket. It's not trying to eliminate fuels and feedstocks to solve our problem. The problem is solved by removing the emissions so that we have a better world to live in."
