7^th of December 2021 9:00 am – 11:20 am cet

Prospective sustainability assessment of energy storage technologies - methods and case studies

The Sub-program 6: Techno-economics and sustainability of energy storage technologies of the EERA Joint Programme Energy Storage (JP ES) offered all EERA JP ES PhD students the possibility to present and discuss their work to their peers within the extended EERA JP ES network.

Scope of the PhD Days:

 
The future energy grid has to be flexible enough to accommodate higher shares of variable renewable generation such as photovoltaic solar and wind generation in a secure way. Hence, the development and integration of sustainable energy storage capacity gets crucial for the clean energy transition. However, no 'silver bullet' has been identified so far, but rather a mix and hybridization of various stationary storage technologies (electrochemical, mechanical, chemical, thermal, and electrical storage) will provide this required system flexibility. In line with this, scheduling models with a sub-hourly resolution are also another source to increment the power system's flexibility through the efficient use of energy storage technologies. Their individual success depends on often hardly predictable future technical advances, actor preferences, development of competing technologies and designs, future cost efficiencies and environmental performance as well as the evolution of market demand and design. Therefore, all those aspects lead to an increasing need to prospectively identify, exploit and exhaust possibilities to design and/or select emerging or evolving technology alternatives considering all sustainability dimensions. This can be done e.g., via Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), techno-economic methods, optimization and qualitative approaches in the combination of prospective methods like scenario analyses, learning curves, extrapolation, etc.

Within this context, the present PhD days will be intended to stimulate exchange and discussions about approaches, tools, research needs and your experiences regarding the following (non-exclusive) topics:

• Prospective Life Cycle Assessment of energy storage technologies and materials
• Prospective techno-economics of energy storage technologies and materials
• Hybridization potential among storage technologies
• Multi-dimensional or multi-crieria assessments of energy storage technologies
• System integration aspects for energy storage technologies in the European energy system

Thus, the PhD days offered the opportunity to present PhD project and receive feedback from other PhD students as well as from senior scientists from the same research environment. Furthermore, the best contribution received an official EERA award and funding for an open access publication.

The best presentation of the first SP6 PhD days with the title:

'Electrochemical energy storage using a next generation battery?'

 was given by

Sanna Wickerts from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden).