DOE releases roadmap to boost U.S. energy storage manufacturing

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
January 7, 2021

The U.S. Department of Energy, in late December, released its plan to ramp up manufacturing capability so that the country’s demand for the energy storage can be filled by domestic sources by 2030.

The Energy Storage Grand Challenge Roadmap, the DOE’s first comprehensive energy storage strategy, calls for accelerating the transition of storage technologies from the lab to the marketplace, focusing on ways to competitively manufacture technologies at scale in the United States, and ensuring secure supply chains to enable domestic manufacturing.

Under the slogan “Innovate Here, Make Here, Deploy Everywhere,” the DOE’s roadmap identifies initial cost targets focused on user-centric applications with substantial growth potential.

For long duration stationary storage applications, the roadmap aims at achieving $0.05 per kilowatt hour (kWh), a 90 percent reduction from 2020 baseline costs by 2030.

Reaching that target would facilitate commercial viability for storage across a wide range of uses such as meeting load during periods of peak demand and ensuring reliability of critical services, the DOE said.

For electric vehicle battery packs, the roadmap target is $80/kWh by 2030 for a 300-mile range electric vehicle, a 44 percent reduction from the current cost of $143/kWh.

Reaching that target would lead to cost competitive electric vehicles and could benefit the production, performance, and safety of batteries for stationary applications, the DOE said.

In conjunction with the release of the Energy Storage Grand Challenge Roadmap, the DOE also released two companion reports, the 2020 Grid Energy Storage Technology Cost and Performance Assessment and the Energy Storage Market Report 2020, which contain data that informed the roadmap and provide further information for the energy stakeholder community.

“Energy storage has an important role to play in our Nation’s energy future,” Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said in a statement. “DOE worked closely with a wide range of stakeholders and partners to develop this actionable Roadmap to help bring promising energy storage technologies to market and position the United States as a global leader in energy storage solutions.”