About this Research Topic

Background

The penetration of renewable energy into the electric grid increases generation from sustainable, low-carbon energy sources, which will dramatically increase the demand for energy storage at different scales for reliable power supply, grid security, and cost reduction for ratepayers. Long-duration and long-term energy storage can bridge the intermittency of renewable sources and reduce the risks incurred by diminished fossil-fuel baseload generation. Long-duration energy storage provides 10-100 hours of charging and discharging duration that is beyond the economics or capacity of conventional batteries. Long-term energy storage means shifting the storage time between charging and discharging by weeks or seasons. The combination of renewable power with such energy storage can create an opportunity for transition to a carbon-free energy future. Therefore, the social-economic and environmental impacts of the new energy era depend on the deployment of long-duration and long-term energy storage.

Several energy storage approaches exist, with thermal, mechanical, chemical, and electrochemical methods either currently being deployed or under development. Long-term storage may favor chemical fuels, while the continuing decrease in renewable costs and curtailment of excess wind and solar generation can create cheap electricity that provides an opportunity for converting renewable power to fuel or chemicals when combining hydrogen with sequestrated or recycled carbon dioxide. Hydrogen can be directly produced using renewable electricity through water electrolysis, and the production cost is dropping steadily due to the advances in water splitting technologies and availability of low-cost electricity. In addition to producing chemicals, hydrogen and subsequent hydrocarbon fuels can be stored long term for seasonal energy shifts, and facilitate both long-term and long-duration energy storage in future carbon-free energy mixes.

This Research Topic will collect the cutting-edge in research activities related to long-duration, long-term energy storage with a view to providing grid resilience with carbon-free energy sources and renewable power generation. This multidisciplinary Research Topic is a platform for engineers and scientists to disseminate their recent research, development, and innovations in the areas of long-duration and long-term energy storage. Submissions of original research, promising materials, systems, methods, technical reports and reviews of development status, protocols, policy and practice reviews in the following subjects are welcome:

1. Analysis showing the benefit of long-duration storage to the grid

2. Technical studies of long duration energy storage systems:
a. Mechanical storage including pumped storage hydropower and compressed air energy storage,
b. Thermal energy storage and pumped thermal electricity storage
c. Thermo-chemical storage
d. Flow batteries

3. Power to fuel or chemicals
a. Hydrogen from renewable sources
b. Renewable fuel from carbon capture and utilization
c. Ammonia synthesis from renewable power

4. Technical and economic comparisons of the above energy storage technologies

Keywords: renewable power, energy storage, thermochemical energy storage, renewable fuel, electric grid

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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