The pace of energy storage deployment is several orders of magnitude faster than in the early 2010s. For example, in 2010 only 4 MW of energy storage capacity was commissioned in the US. A sharp increase in storage systems popularity is associated with the spread of renewable energy sources (RES), whose usage involves risks for consumers during windless and cloudy weather.
According to Rystad Energy’s preliminary estimate, the U.S. solar panel deployment accelerated from 33 GW in 2017-2020 to 74 GW in 2021-2024. Commissioning of onshore wind generators has slowed down slightly (from 30 GW to 21 GW, respectively), but still significantly outpaces the commissioning rate of weather-independent power plants. For example, the third and the fourth units of the Vogtle NPP connected to the grid in 2023-2024 were only the third and the fourth reactors commissioned in the United States since 2000. Meanwhile, between 2021 and the first half of 2024, 36.5 GW of coal-fired thermal power plant capacity was decommissioned in the US.
Cheaper technologies made possible energy storage boom. The global average cost of storage fell tenfold between 2010 and 2023, from $1,400 per kWh to less than $140 per kWh according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) estimate. At the same time, the industry has become a significant trendsetter in mining. Global capex for the extraction of metals for “new” energy – including lithium, nickel and cobalt – rose by 30% in 2022 and by another 10% in 2023, exceeding $50 billion per year. In turn, global production of natural graphite – the main raw material for anodes of lithium-ion batteries – increased by more than 90% between 2017 and 2023 (from 886,000 to 1,668,000 tons, according to the Energy Institute).
Storage proliferation might become a key trend in the U.S. power sector in the second half of the 2020s. In the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, such a trend was the shift from coal to gas for power generation, and at the turn of the 2010s and 2020s, a sharp increase in the RES development.
