Long Story Short: Nate Blair on Energy Storage (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video Long Story Short: Nate Blair on Energy Storage.

This video features an interview with NREL’s Nate Blair on the challenges and future of energy storage across the globe.

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[Nate Blair speaks]

We've been looking at energy storage across several fronts at NREL over many years. As we look to the future of energy storage, we see significant deployment both within the U.S. and globally.

We see significant adoption in the vehicle sector and we see ongoing cost reductions and new technologies in energy storage.

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Batteries are a hot topic right now, in large part because the price of batteries has dropped dramatically over about the last 10 years. So that's made them a lot more viable to use to support the grid.

Energy storage mitigates the issues that come from variable renewable energy on the grid and at your home. Solar obviously is only during the day and wind varies from hour to hour. And what energy storage can do is absorb the excess solar and excess wind that's being produced and then use it later when there's less renewables available.

Energy storage can provide a lot of resilience locally at the building level.

A team of us have been recently working in Puerto Rico, where they have a long history of outages and hurricanes. We're looking out at the grid as the grid potentially approaches 100% renewable energy.

There's a significant set of analysis questions about what's the optimum way to do that and how much energy storage to include in that solution.

Energy storage is exciting because it's very dynamic. Costs have continued to drop, and our research indicates that costs will continue to drop as markets increase.

There is a lot of active effort within the battery space only looking at new chemistries and new ways of manufacturing. I think many companies see this as a really growing, hot industry, and so there's a lot of R&D going on.

NREL has several roles related to energy storage, both from basic R&D to helping various communities deploy energy storage. And all of this goes towards NREL's overall mission to reduce pollution and create a clean energy future for the entire country.

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