Foreword
Electricity is tantamount to modernity. Everything we associate with a
21st-century world is predicated on the availability of electricity. Oddly
enough, the electricity we consume is generated in real time because our
electric grid operates such that supply must be in balance with demand,
everywhere, at all times. This makes the grid the world’s largest supply
chain with zero inventory. Imagine if every time you turned on your fau-
cet the water had to be drawn immediately from a spring because there is
no water storage. Then when you shut off the water, the flow from the
spring must be cut back or there will be a pressure buildup in the pipes,
leading to damage. There are analogies for electricity. With supply exceed-
ing demand, we can expect the voltage to rise and the frequency to shift,
both with devastating consequences. What is worse than no electricity?
Bad electricity. Imagine if every time you were to plug in a device you’d
have to ask yourself, “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you?”
We deal with this balancing requirement by overcapacity and redun-
dancy, which leads to unparalleled inefficiency (underutilized assets in
generation, transmission, and distribution as well as excessive emissions).
Add to the mix the environmental imperative, which leads to widespread
adoption of renewables such as solar and wind, which are intermittent and
therefore by themselves incapable of being integrated into baseload genera-
tion. We deal with this intermittency by overcapacity and redundancy,
which leads to unparalleled inefficiency. . . . Storage is the missing piece.
Grid-scale batteries would give utilities an emissions-free, easily dispatch-
able way to store energy that can be summoned during moments of surg-
ing demand. Batteries would do to electricity what the advent of refrigeration
did for our food supply and storage tanks did for our water supply.
In The Electric Battery: Charging Forward to a Low-Carbon Future, the
authors clearly explain the history of the electric battery and its importance
