We are pleased to share that our Founder & CEO, Peter Schniering, and Director of Technologies and Impact, Magnolia Tovar, attended the 29th Meeting of the Technology Executive Committee (TEC) of United Nations Climate Change in Bonn last week. Together, they presented an input on the importance of planning now for storage for power and heat based on key results from our joint RD&D survey and our recent work on long duration and thermal energy storage.
Some key aspects of our presentation were:
✅ Solar and wind energy will grow to be the backbone of global power systems. As these sources are intermittent, we require multiple flexibility tools to manage this and there is a global consensus on the relevance of storage as a key pillar of this flexibility, with energy storage emerging as the most urgent technology for emissions reduction in the results from our joint RD&D survey.
✅ Storage requirements increase non-linearly as renewable penetration increases on grids; we must therefore anticipate these needs and build long duration energy storage in tandem with renewable deployment.
✅ Flexibility needs range from hourly to seasonal timescales. No single technology is capable of addressing the whole spectrum; rather, a portfolio of storage technologies will be required to address all timescales.
✅ The focus on the power sector often means that heat is neglected, even though it accounts for half of global final energy use. For heat applications, thermal energy storage is an underestimated tool and can shift heat electrification from being a burden to being a flexible and valuable asset for power grids.
Once again, a big thank you to the TEC for the opportunity to be part of this meeting!
