This is a back-of-the-envelope bit of work only.
I’ve been thinking about ways people could use the Power Ledger platform to disrupt traditional energy, including energy storage.
One of PL’s coolest functions is fractionalised ownership of energy assets, what they call ‘asset germination events’. This is being touted as a way for, say, an apartment family to own solar even if they don’t have access to their own permanent roof space. As a renter, you could also own a virtual solar share which you could bring with you as you move from job to job and city to city.
Has anyone thought about using POWR’s ‘asset germination events’ for energy storage?
Imagine you’re a home solar farmer thinking about upgrading to a storage system, like a Tesla Powerwall. For those sitting on normal variable electricity rates (similar to this one from Origin Energy), University of Melbourne estimates the cost per kWh of storage should be roughly AUD$1000 to break even. Right now, batteries cost around $1000-3000 per kWh, so it’s pretty close.
But there’s a much cheaper way that solar energy can be stored for the night hours, or the proverbial wet windless week in winter – pumped hydro. Pumped hydro is the oldest, most mature, and biggest scale storage technology around. It costs round $100 per kWh – somewhere between 3 and 10 per cent the cost of lithium-ion, on a per kWh basis :-)
Obviously the problem here is that pumped hydro developments are big projects – from a dozen MW to gigawatt scale, potentially thousands of times more than a home battery. These economies of scale are simply not accessible to home solar farmers, which is why a lot of experts have concluded that home battery storage is going to be the eventual winner because it can be driven by consumer-scale uptake.
Or will it? I wonder if Power Ledger’s fractionalised ownership model could give thousands of solar farmers a way to aggregate and partner in a cooperatively owned grid-scale storage asset, which use an inexpensive storage medium (gravity and water) without the life-cycle environmental implications of batteries.
I could also imagine a pumped hydro developer – like Genex Power – using Power Ledger to effectively crowdfund a pumped hydro development. They could tokenise the asset, buy excess energy from the token holders (rooftop solar owners) and act as their energy provider at night.
We have no idea how POWR token holders might use the platform in the future. But I love imagining little examples of how a project could offer the fabled ’10 times better or 10 times cheaper’ rule for exponentially disruptive growth.
For Power Ledger's Initial Coin Offering, there is still time to get in on those ICO bonuses…and help save the world from catastrophic climate change.
EDIT: We used pumped hydro as an example, but the possibility is there for any energy storage technology which offers low costs at otherwise inaccessible economies of scale. Compressed air might be one example; grid-scale silicon batteries another. These are cheap storage technologies that don't bring any of the environmental/product stewardship baggage of lithium batteries.