Lithium ion battery industry to boom with wind, solar power

Lithium ion batteries used as energy storage for utilities will be a $1 billion industry by 2018, according to a report released Wednesday by Pike Research called "Energy Storage Technology Markets."

Much of the lithium ion battery development has been geared toward perfecting the batteries as power sources for electronics, and in recent years, cars. But the alternative energy industry is going to benefit from that research, too. Once that happens, there will be a surge in the sales of industrial-scale lithium ion batteries for power utilities, according to Pike research.

"Utilities will be the downstream beneficiaries of innovation and investment in lithium ion batteries for the transportation sector," Pike Research analyst David Link said in a statement.

The energy storage industry in general is poised to grow as more private and public organizations embrace wind and solar energy worldwide. Because wind and solar systems provide energy in bursts and their cycles are not usually in sync with local peak energy usage hours, power storage when using wind or solar will become an obvious necessity for utilities, according to Pike Research.

Out of eleven methods of energy storage, Pike Research found that lithium ion batteries for utility use will be the fastest growing segment of the storage industry.

Sodium Sulfur (NAS) batteries and kinetic storage systems like pumped hydro and Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) were seen as the next likely leading utility energy storage solutions.

[crtoca]

So I checked the report, and the finding about lithium-ion being the fasted growing segment is based on the projection of li-ion in cars, and growth in that segment is based on new research or developments that address the safety and cost of the batteries. The need for storage is projected to be huge, and the system that will be commercially available in large enough quantity will be li-ion, assuming that the explosion in li-ion cars occurs. Whether or not the electric car / li-ion explosion occurs, the need will still exist.

In the meantime, flow batteries are available now and reported on in the study. More information on the VRB flow battery is at http://www.utility-savings.com.

[yokio0909]

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