Nowadays, the era belonging to energy storage has arrived.
As the mainstay of clean energy, both wind and photovoltaic are highly volatile and must rely on large-scale energy storage to achieve efficient power generation.
The stored energy can be used for any form of energy supply, from coal to wind, and for any purpose from transportation to heating. People can use energy when needed rather than only when it is produced, resulting in greater energy efficiency.
This means that there is a growing need for energy storage. Forms of energy storage need to evolve, innovate and broaden the variety of means of energy storage.
Pumped storage
Pumped storage is the most reliable and economical energy storage device for power systems with the longest life cycle and the largest capacity.
The form of pumped storage is not only a popular form of energy storage today, but will also grow rapidly in the future.
There are now many regions where pumped storage power plants are built. At present, the scale of pumped storage power plants accounts for about 90%. Still, there are problems such as geographic location restrictions, long construction cycles of power plants, large preliminary investments, etc.
In contrast, electrochemical energy storage has the advantages of small geographic location restrictions, a short construction cycle, and continuous cost reduction, and it is expected to become the future mainstream.
Renewable energy generation is volatile or intermittent on different time scales such as minutes, hours, and days, so there are different types of energy storage such as capacity type, power type, energy type, and standby type to meet the needs of different application scenarios.
Electrochemical energy storage then becomes the next baton in the energy storage relay race.
Electrochemical Energy Storage
There are always a limited number of locations suitable for building pumped storage plants.
Comparatively speaking, electrochemical energy storage is more flexible and has a wider range of application scenarios. There are also many kinds of electrochemical energy storage, including lead-acid batteries, lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, liquid flow batteries, and sodium-sulfur batteries.
The scale of grid-connected construction of photovoltaic power generation is becoming more and more widespread, and many families also purchase portable power stations to serve as backup energy for their homes.
Now the cost of electrochemical energy storage is also entering the viable zone and will develop rapidly in the future, and the future market scale of energy storage will become larger and larger.
