US Not Ready To Give Up On Energy Storage — Yet

The booming US wind and solar industries have been feeding a rapid spurt of growth in the energy storage sector throughout the early 2000’s, and all that hard work is beginning to pay off. In the latest news, the US Department of Energy has released $15 million in funding for a suite of next-generation storage projects that will help shepherd even more renewable energy into the grid. Wait … what?!

Energy Storage Is Energy Agnostic

Considering the abrupt shift in White House energy policy this year, it may seem weird for the Energy Department to continue disbursing funds that support the US wind and solar industries. Dropping $15 million on next-generation storage seems doubly out of sync with the current wave of partisan attacks on renewable energy. That includes the Republican majority in Congress, which is poised to pass a new tax bill aimed at choking off wind and solar development in the US.

However, now that the risks and impacts of climate change are kicking in with full force, energy storage is attracting interest beyond the wind and solar industries. In terms of grid-supplied electricity, energy storage applies to whatever is in the grid regardless of the source, including fossil energy.

The data center boom, in particular, has pushed the urgency of grid improvements alongside onsite power generation and ample emergency backup power on site, too. Data center stakeholders and other large-scale energy consumers are eager to get their hands on the most reliable and resilient energy resources money can buy, and energy storage is in the running.

In addition to replacing gas or diesel-fueled emergency backup generators at grid-connected facilities, onsite energy storage can also be deployed as a matter of routine, to avoid peak daytime rates and save a considerable amount of money on utility bills. That economic benefit holds true regardless of the source of the kilowatts. Though, all things being equal, the situation calls for more cleantech, not less. After all, wind, solar (especially solar), and storage have proven to be a more economical and faster-to-install solution than any other energy resource in recent years.

Building A Better Flow Battery

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the US flow battery startup Quino Energy. The “Quino” in the name refers to the company’s deployment of common organic molecules called quinones in its flow battery formula. That’s a break with conventional flow batteries, which typically rely on the transition metal vanadium (not vibranium!).

Among other benefits, the use of quinones enables Quino to deploy its technology in existing oil storage tanks without corroding them, thereby cutting the cost of new flow battery hardware down to the bone (see more flow battery background here).

This year has been a busy one for Quino. In April, the company and its partner Long Hill Energy Partners received $10 million from the California Energy Commission towards the first commercial deployment of Quino’s quinone-enabled flow battery, to be hosted by the High Desert Regional Health Center in Lancaster, California.

Earlier this week, the Quino emailed CleanTechnica to remind us that an additional $5 million in funding for the project is being provided by CiFER, the Critical Facility Energy Resilience program housed in the Energy Department’s Office of Electricity.

“This milestone project will implement Quino’s organic flow battery to provide critical energy resiliency and back-up power capacity for up to 100% of HDRHC’s energy demand, while enabling $10 million in electricity cost savings over the technology’s 20-year life,” Quino wrote by email.

More US Dollars For More Energy Storage

CiFER makes a good case for energy storage and other grid resiliency infrastructure, for any kind of kilowatt from anywhere.

“Energy resiliency is crucial to support the nation’s electricity grid through extreme weather events, cyber or physical attacks, aging infrastructure, and electromagnetic events with the potential to cause widespread power outages,” CiFER explains.

In addition to the Quino project, last week, CiFER awarded grants to two other projects under the $15 million funding opportunity, which was announced last summer.

“The selected projects will help advance innovative storage technologies from early-stage research and development to widespread commercialization,” CiFER adds.

One of the other two awardees is Binghamton University and its partners. They received $5 million for a new energy storage system called a “Bio-Mineralized Lithium Mixed-Metal Phosphate grid-scale battery,” to be applied to a to-be-disclosed facility in New York State.

About $4 million went to the remaining awardee, a partnership featuring the iron-sodium battery startup Inlyte.

Inlyte claims a dual-use capability for its iron-sodium battery. In one use case, the Inlyte battery provides for short-term duration of 4–10 hours, stretching just beyond the limits of Li-ion batteries. The new battery can also fill a long duration slot of 24 hours or more.

Under the terms of the grant, Inlyte will install its iron-sodium battery on the grounds of the nonprofit organization Alliance Redwoods, a longtime retreat destination for church groups and other nonprofits located in Occidental, California.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Speaking of clean energy improvements at faith-related institutions, all through the early 2000’s, houses of worship, along with all other nonprofit organizations, were cut off from longstanding federal tax credits for installing onsite wind, solar, and storage. The reason was simple: they don’t pay taxes, so how can they get a tax credit?

Some projects trickled through with the help of revolving loan programs and other workarounds, but the floodgates didn’t really open until 2022, when the then-Democratic majority in Congress passed the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act on their own, with exactly zero support from Republican members. The IRA established an “elective pay” system for untaxed institutions, enabling them to apply federal tax credits to new wind, solar, and storage projects without impacting their tax-exempt status.

The Republican Party now holds the majority vote in Congress, and they are ripping through the Inflation Reduction Act brick by brick. Will the elective pay system survive for nonprofits? Who knows! The Republican tax bill (aka the “Big Beautiful Bill”) is currently hovering around the Senate at 940 pages. If you can find elective pay in there somewhere, drop a note in the comment thread.

Even if elective pay does survive, nonprofits will have to make due with a cleantech industry in retreat. For reasons best known only to themselves, throttling back the wind, solar, and storage industries has been a leading priority of the Republican Party since the turn of the century, and the tax bill is their chance to achieve a long-wished-for dream.

The Senate version of the new tax bill is described as “even worse” than the House version, but that’s not quite the end of the process. Democrats in the Senate aim to leverage their minority status to give the tax bill a well-deserved public airing this week, providing the voting public with another opportunity to contact their members of Congress and weigh in with their own opinions.

Image: The first commercial application of a new, quinone-enabled flow battery system for long duration energy storage will take place at medical facility in California (courtesy of Quino Energy via CleanTechnica archive).