 all for getting up this early. So I'm going to just set the stage for long duration storage, remind you the spectacular progress that has been made in renewable energy. Concentrated solar offshore wind, the red line is the rough wholesale price of fossil fuel naturally as for example. Onshore wind, solar voltaic are dipping below that and even offshore wind in a decade or two might come below that. So that's great news. So what's the problem? The problem is getting just below levelized cost of electricity is not enough. It probably has to be about two-fold below because there has to be increased energy storage, enhanced transmission distribution and backup generating capacity if you're run out of even long duration. In long duration we will define as anything more than three days. So anyway, so let's talk about energy storage. This is the article that Jimmy's talked about, long duration electricity storage and just to summarize this article they were comparing it to natural gas peaking plants and how, what would have to be the cost to be competitive natural gas peaking plants and they decided ten or twenty dollars a kilowatt hour would be good enough. What is it now? It's about two hundred dollars a kilowatt hour if you're generous, three hundred if you pay the full bill and maybe two thousand times more than we have today. So that's the challenge. This is the long duration storage battery and so when you have renewable energy you pump water up a hill in this case from underground to a water tower for irrigation and it's currently 95% of all electrical storage around the world and 95% of the US. So if you look at the time scales of what you need we're going to focus on the upper right hand corner and that's you know powered to gas, you're thinking of pump hydro storage, compressed air energy storage which has been around for a long time but so far no one has been able to make commercially viable compressed air storage. There's a difference between compressing air and compressing water. It has to do with physics. The work done is force times distance. When you pump move an incompressible fluid the distance is slowly and lifting something up and you get it back. When you're pumping a gas you're compressing the gas and that's a real problem and so for that reason even though it sounds good in principle it hasn't taken off. So pump hydro storage is the dominant form. One is looking at hydrogen and other things and sorry about that and then down here you see thermal storage and I'll say a few words about that. So what's the pump hydro storage capacity around the world? It's led by China and Japan. United States has received applications to build an additional 18.9 gigawatts. So pump storage comes in two units it's power and energy storage. So gigawatts is the power, 18 gigawatts and you have corresponding gigawatt hours. That's good that would increase it by 1.9 but these are just applications and maybe if we're lucky half of them will be built. So that's the US if all goes well. What about China? China's over here. What's that over here? They're playing 270 gigawatts. So that stretches outside the building and they are more serious about this and so they will have more pump storage than the rest of the world combined maybe by two fold but certainly more than the rest of the world combined and you know having said that when you have pump storage only a few countries have the geography number one. Number two they're not these dams are not everywhere and so that's gigawatts not megawatts. No it's gigawatts 21,000 gigawatts and pump storage requires expanded transmission distribution systems. So this is an example of what China is building today. Those are the areas. It's not just in southwestern part of China where they're major hydro is but they're looking everywhere and they're noting that they don't want really long transmission lines because transmission lines are very costly about a million dollars per gigawatt per mile. So on the yellow is non-reservoir pump storage. Let me talk a little bit about two other things that are being considered. Even more so seriously the flow batteries, the conical ones are vanadium but in the end that's not going to scale right and so I just saw last week a very exciting work of Nian Lu who used to be first a graduate student with Yixue then a co-directed graduate postdoc with Meanyi and he's working on a zinc flow battery where he's achieved a conceptual idea that seems to work much longer lived membrane much cheaper much higher energy density membrane. The good thing about flow batteries is the tanks can be huge and so you can have a very long storage because it's just you know negative and positive electrolytes and the issue always has been the round-trip efficiency and the longevity and efficiency of these porous membranes. But some good progress is being made new ideas. Heat storage also has good scaling because the surface first of all we can make very very good heat insulators and and it scales properly so if you go to bigger and bigger thermal storage it's nice. People have been talking about so-called Carnot engines you have extra energy in any form you put it into something hot and then you want to turn the hot either use it directly for space building that's easy but for industrial purposes you need to come come back to electricity because you're not storing super high temperatures you can't get to a thousand degrees. Okay so what is new about Bob Laughlin's idea is that as let's say if you're going to charge the battery so you take energy from T1 on the right hand side and you pump it to T2 you heat it up. There's an energy exchanger and then you're at the same time you're discharging heat energy at T0 plus and going to T0. Looks a little backward why you want to do this but it turns out if the turbine is 100% energy-efficient and the heat exchange is 100% energy-efficient this is a reversible reaction and so in Laughlin's original paper he predicted 72% lower than 72% independent people said it could be really in reality given the existing turbines and heat exchangers it could be 65%. Flow batteries are about 70% currently they're not that much better. So Bob tells me that Siemens is entering into a project agreement to just test this at reasonable scale but we'll see. Hydrogen different colors of hydrogen there may be a pink or purple hydrogen but it doesn't matter the fundamental colors are gray blue and green gray as you take methane steam methane reforming you turn to CO2 and hydrogen you vent to CO2 you're no better off in greenhouse gases but at least local pollution is much less. Blue hydrogen you do the same steam methane reforming process you trap the carbon dioxide and sequester let's say under the inflation reduction act has gotten a lot of blue hydrogen players in the market to put hydrogen put CO2 under the Gulf of Mexico and depleted oil reservoirs. Green hydrogen use clean energy carbon-free greenhouse gas free energy renewables or nuclear. Okay so what are the problems? The electrolyzers remain too expensive. Electrolysis is inherently a two dimensional effect it's a surface area effect measured in amps per square centimeter a milli amps per square centimeter and the important thing is actually how much you can produce in a cubic volume because that defines the capital costs. Some very nice ideas coming along to try to get effectively a more three-dimensional aspect to this and of course we need to eliminate some of the metals that are currently used. Downside is hydrogen is very very leaky much more leaky than natural gas for example and it's been determined that if it can stay in the atmosphere and keep methane from degrading into carbon dioxide which turns out to be very bad because methane is 84 times worse than carbon dioxide but only lives there for 20 years roughly and with hydrogen it could double it could triple it. There's another thing with remote sensing we've also discovered the hydrogen leaking from oil exploration recovery was under reported. You can now just look at the plumes with infrared lasers but another thing also scary is the natural gas fields themselves are oozing methane and the exploration accelerates that and so there are estimates as high as you know what switching to natural gas is no better than coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Okay so that's another bad thing and finally we have no good way of detecting hydrogen the mass spectrometry means you ionize the molecule into atoms and ions and you bend it in a magnetic field very expensive detector there's not that is not a remote sensor and it's a remote sensing that's very important. Having said that hydrogen could decarbonize a lot of things I can decarbonize a lot and steal plastics chemicals for lasers the rest. So we will probably use it needed but we have to be very careful. Commercial batteries for EVs this is energy density per weight and per volume they're going to be here in about a decade I can say this with some confidence because I'm the board of a battery company I do battery research and we're shipping samples that are up there and so shipping samples means it could be deployed in 10 years not five but ten. Another good news about EV batteries is this is the learning curve it was just trickling at the very beginning but in the last lower right hand side it's developed a really healthy slope the lower number there is two hundred dollars per kilowatt hour it's now about a hundred ten dollars a kilowatt hour GM has announced in next four years they don't want to pay above eighty seven dollars a kilowatt hour for a battery pack. So it is really plunging and the question is how far it will continue. It depends on a lot of material resources already cobalt and nickel are deemed too expensive the all the OEM manufacturers are going to iron phosphate but what about lithium lithium is also possible I might get to that. Let's talk about utility scale batteries even though we think we can get enough lithium if mine out of seawater to satisfy the EV market it won't be enough to satisfy the utility scale market worldwide and so people are looking at much cheaper materials zinc is a favorite sodium possibly iron other things also aqueous instead of organic because you want safety you have imagine these huge farms of these batteries and they can catch fire with all batteries that we're looking at there is a perennial coating and that is if you want to use a metal anode let's say zinc foil and you charge too quickly you form these dendrites and so people are looking very hard at suppressing dendrites in various ways this is true of sodium this is true of zinc just a prelude to possible strategies this is for a lithium sulfur battery for EVs not you know be zinc and something else but anyway the idea here is that when you charge too fast you create instabilities and little fingers of metal grow and so if one can produce a barrier that's right on the metal so that the the the metal that's your conducting ion can travel easily through the barrier but it's so strong just suppresses dendrites so imagine this is right on the surface that possibly could work this is some work that I've been doing with young Heisen who's now a permanent member at Slack and also with Eastway where we've taken two dimensional material hexagonal boron nitride is like graphene and when you radiation damage it you would find that this makes a very very strong layer allows in this case a lithium to travel through but it separates it from the electrolytes and other things and and a half battery it can go a thousand cycles without degradation and in a coin battery it goes it's very stable until the electrolyte combines with the metal and the sulfur that's a known chemistry of the electrolyte we use and then it crashes so the good news is if you get a better electrolyte maybe this would work but the better news it can also work in all these other metals that are for aqueous batteries and so we're going to start working on this because it should be able to filter those as well one final comment I'm one or two minutes over Chung Lu when she was here at Stanford as a postdoc co-directing me and Yi figured out how to extract lithium out of seawater and the work that she did at Stanford you get seawater 20,000 to one sodium to lithium ratio and it's a half a battery it's iron phosphate and you pass that out the material in that iron phosphate you find it's 50% a lithium which is good enough however she went to the University of Chicago as assistant professor she got to understand the chemistry and physics a little bit better and can engineer the inter- cladding compound so you can use lithium to prime it and squeeze the layers together so that means that the sodium the little bit of sodium does not go in which does ultimately destroy the material you want to keep the sodium out and now she's in ratio recovery of 10 to 5 that means you start with one and two set 20,000 and you get 7.6 to one lithium to sodium and so that's an example of what's going on with this sort of stuff this is not polluting so and the electricity costs are irrelevant so if you can make this work many many thousands thousand cycles it could be a way so with that there's a lot of things happening very exciting things in flow batteries Bob Lofen's idea may work and we'll see and but then meanwhile the old technology pump storage should still rule and so it's going to be a mixture of chemical batteries hydrogen pump storage maybe heat storage and one final thing the learning curve for pump storage is not the right sign it's because of political opposition and even our governor in California has a lot of pressure to tear down hydroelectric dams so if you can nudge him to not do that thank you I'm doing my best good morning thank you best America with Chevron technology ventures can you speak a little bit about is there a trade-off between transmission and storage are we going to give up transmission if storage no there shouldn't be a trade-off you're gonna need transmission anyway and but transmission is major problem of the siding when I was Secretary of Energy the time you wanted to site applied for an application the time it was built was 11 years I was trying to get that to three years got an agreement multi-agency agreement Ken Zollis are said fine you're in charge we can do this an hour after meeting he closed him and said Steve my people won't back this they're afraid you might make it happen and fishing wildlife game don't want their hunting and fishing grounds with transmission lines so it's the there's oppositional politics and a lot of things and and that we've got to come over yeah thank you Steven you first-year undergrad student here so I was wondering there's a lot of worry about pump hydro storage not being the cleanest form of energy storage and when the water level goes down and methane comes up from under the ground so how do you think about this in comparison to other forms of battery storage or other forms of energy well in the water level doesn't actually have to come down the methane is gonna bubble up anyway and what happens is there is organic debris that goes to the bottom of these reservoirs and there is some anaerobic stuff going on and methane and CO2 come up this is of concern unbalanced it's I personally think there are ways of dealing with this how do you suppress the organic matter debris so it doesn't make as much methane and CO2 and doesn't do anything untold to the environment I think that's our best way of doing it that's a real issue but it's not you know it it's not a major issue every lake in the world has methane emissions because of that reason but if you look at the scorecard of where the methane mission comes from it's its own gas exploration gas leaks cows burping and organic waste food waste things like that so that's a small part and of course rice in the two weeks it's flooded also has methane emission people working very hard to figure out how you can modify that to keep the microbes at bay there and with that maybe we can do something about reservoirs