How to store clean generated power in a safe and sustainable way.
[Applause]
thank you
hi this year i went through a personal
energy transition
i went from working at one of the energy
majors to become a founding partner
in a business that brings a sustainable
battery to the market
and i learned how critical energy
storage is
for the success of the energy transition
so i’d like to tell you about it but
more importantly
i hope you will also get involved
ingrid she’s the former ceo
of one of our dutch electricity network
providers
and she calls the energy transition
the rotor for bowing from netherlands
the great dutch renovation
and i like that metaphor because we need
to renovate
both inside our houses but also reinvent
the way we
generate electricity and distribute it
across the country
and don’t worry i will not try and cover
all of the energy transition in this
talk
and i will focus on energy storage
which is one of our renovation projects
that we must get right
to meet our own energy transition
ambitions
so what’s the problem we are used to
centrally built power plants that
generate
electricity where we need it when we
need it
and exactly how much we need so there’s
no need to store electricity
but that’s not how renewables work they
are generated at many different
locations where we have wind turbines or
solar panels
and all these mini power plants generate
electricity when we have sun and wind
unfortunately that’s not always the case
and that’s a problem because we love
energy and we need electricity
for almost everything we do it is the
expectation that by 2050
we will use twice as much electricity as
we use
compared to today with the growing world
population
and the electrification of the way we
live
and we want that electricity to be
sustainable
the dutch climate agreement targets that
already by 2030
70 of our electricity
will come from renewable sources of
energy and that’s great news
but what happens when we add all that
renewable energy
to our current grid
we will have unexpected power outages
and the price of electricity will go up
and down
so we need to solve that problem as part
of our great dutch renovation
the the other day i was browsing through
the
ikea guide and i came across this wisdom
for renovation projects
and it said that for a successful
renovation
you need to have a dream a design
drive and a deadline and you know what
that actually applies to the energy
transition as well
the dream and the deadline are clear
co2 neutral by 2050 70
of our electricity from renewables by
- but the design
and the way we’re going to get there the
plan
has not yet landed
and we seem to lack the urgency the
drive to make some really difficult
decisions on time
so energy storage is one of those
and as you said it energy storage is hot
it’s considered one of the missing
pieces of the puzzle in the energy
transition
so let me tell you a little bit more
about batteries storage
and certainly ours because i’m proud of
it
the most used battery today is made from
lithium-ion
and you’re probably aware of some of the
concerns
associated with that battery
it’s made from rare resources that are
mined under poor labor conditions
and requires a lot of water in co2
and you probably know from your cell
phone or your laptop that they don’t
always have a very long life
so the challenge we have is that we want
clean batteries for our clean energy
i do not believe that that we will have
one solution that fits all needs
and so lithium-ion may well continue to
be the best solution for cars
but the world is searching hard to find
alternatives
that are both sustainable and affordable
so hydrogen could be such an alternative
it’s it’s early days but it looks
promising and certainly for long-term
storage
from summers with lots of sun to winters
when we have little of it
or flow batteries like ours
let me check if it’s also there because
i want to show you
so flow batteries
are also built for big storage and so
integrating them for example with solar
and wind
and how do they work well they’re made
actually of two tanks
filled with liquids called an
electrolyte separated by a membrane
and an electric current occurs when ions
travel through that membrane
from one tank to the other and with that
simple mechanism
you can charge or discharge a battery
i find it great to work with scientists
that have actually developed
a real breakthrough technology the
breakthrough solution
in flow battery technology and they’ve
literally taken their ideas from the lab
to
a commercial product and that’s a
process
that’s taken close to 10 years and more
than 100 million dollars in investments
so the main ingredient in our battery is
vanadium
it’s quite an abundant resource
but our producer actually retrieves the
vanadium
from industrial waste from south
and due to the patented special
chemistry of our electrolyte
the battery has unlimited use over more
than 20 years
requires very little maintenance and it
doesn’t get warmer on fire
and it has doesn’t have capacity fade
and once it’s at the end of its useful
life you can recycle all parts
and use the electrolyte to build yet
another battery
so i’m genuinely proud that our battery
is a real sustainable storage solution
oh and if you use it intensely it’s
actually significantly cheaper than
lithium-ion
so you may think now why is she doing a
ted talk and not just selling these
batteries well
we do that too but there’s something
weird going on
because as long as fossil fuel is still
cheaper compared to renewables and as
long as
our renewable energy can always be
handed back to the grid
at a guaranteed price there’s no
economic drive
to invest in storage
so that brings me back to our great
dutch renovation because we need to fix
that problem
because we want to have that 70 percent
of electricity
in the mix by 2030. so
what are the design obstacles that we
need to overcome
where we want to integrate all those
renewables
well the first one is that most
renewable energy is
actually generated in the north of the
country or offshore
but we use most electricity in the
southwest of the country
so lots of electricity in frisland
but our current grid is not built to
transport it to the landstart
nor do we have the possibility to store
it so if we don’t use it
we’ll lose it and then there’s a problem
that we do not always have sun and wind
so most renewable energy is actually
generated during the day
but we use most electricity between six
and ten at night
when we come home plug in our cars start
cooking
laundry watching television
so in tomorrow’s world we need to
collect the electricity the energy when
there’s sun and wind
transport it to the place where we need
it
and store it for when we need it so that
requires
a major investment in our electricity
grid
and in storage well you may think hey
we’ve got 10 years to do that that’s a
long time
but to reinvent our power infrastructure
we really need to start today
but if we wait with our investments
until they are risk-free
or profitable we will have missed our
deadline
and possibly disrupt energy continuity
and i don’t think we can afford
either one of these
so i hope that by now you’re thinking
hey but what is it that i can do to be
prepared
well as consumers and we can all be
smart and efficient
in how we use electricity and we can
start preparing our houses at
that indoor renovation to move from
gas towards electricity
but for companies and municipalities
there are already great opportunities
so take this creative example where we
work with a fantastic co2 neutral beach
club at thursday at western
and they plan to build a carport covered
with solar panels
over a big parking lot store the
electricity
and not just use it themselves but to
create
a sustainable energy community with
their neighbors
it takes entrepreneurs volunteers
experts who volunteer their knowledge
the municipality the province
to collaborate to develop such a plan
but there’s far more to storage than
integrating it with
solar and wind have you thought about
the diesel generator that you need for
backup power
why not replace it with a clean battery
that can even
work both ways and earn you some revenue
or as a nitrogen free solution at your
construction site
or festival location
and all those electrical cars that need
that we need to fast charge at the side
of the road
they need energy storage they need
buffers
to help us all out
and that brings me to drive and we need
a drive for that
that renovation project and um
it takes drive to to change our habits
and to search for innovations
and and i can tell you from working with
with
my colleagues that
research innovation takes lots of drive
it’s not a process that comes with with
guaranteed success
it can be costly take a long time
through try on error
so my colleagues started working on the
first sustainable storage solutions
30 years ago when most of us did not
even realize we had this problem coming
so think about the drive you need to
keep going
for 30 years
but you know what we are super dependent
on these innovators
some 50 percent of the
emission reductions that we need by 2050
will come from technologies that are
just in their infants issues today
so we need to help innovators we need to
foster them
so let’s not turn them into legal or
fiscal campaigners
or subsidy experts there’s no time for
that
and they’re not good at it either
so i know from my personal experience
the policy makers can help and make it
easier for us to
bring innovations into the real society
just think with us in terms of
possibilities
rather than obstacles
economic profits can also be a very
powerful source of drive
and money makes the world go round but
as i i said
before then the market is not yet doing
this
but we have no time to wait for the
market
so what can be done to get to get going
well subsidies and financial guarantees
can help to make early investments in
innovations at attractive
and look what happened to solar and wind
and that works
but even more important than financial
support
are clear and consistent policies
because they provide a road map
to future costs and benefits and that
takes out risk
an entrepreneur we want to know what
technologies or emissions
will be allowed in future so that they
can plan their next round of investments
we need to be able to have trust and
long-term clarity on fiscal treatments
and subsidies take out the risk from the
economics in your project
and we have some great examples the eu
has set aside
a fantastic subsidy to build an entire
sustainable value chain for batteries in
europe
and at the same time they’re changing
the law so they’re also making it
mandatory the batteries within the eu
will be more sustainable so a carrot and
a stick
so the nice side effects of that are
that we are creating
jobs in europe economic growth and we
become more independent
for something as strategic as energy
storage
so we’ve got help at european level
but i’d like to ask for for that as well
at national
and local level as i said there’s little
time
and we really need to get going and
learn
practice how do we store energy at grid
scale
together we are working on a once
in a lifetime renovation project we want
our new reality to be sustainable
we know the outline but there’s still a
lot to be done
and there’s little time so i have two
calls to action
policy makers please help us set the
rules of the game so that we get the
market going
because we need to learn and practice
how we can make the energy transition
work
and to all of us consumers investors
entrepreneurs
there are mind-blowing innovations out
there
i hope you got curious try them
and that your next choice will be a
sustainable one
i got curious about the battery this
year so what are you gonna explore
thank you