Understanding the realistic timescales for the commercialisation of different energy technologies in this way could provide a critically important ‘reality-check’ for future low-carbon scenario-analysis, in terms of which technologies are required to be deployed at given points in time.
Electricity generation technologies are considered to be in widespread commercialisation when their installed capacity first reaches 20% of peak installed capacity of the technology in question (the maximum installed capacity of that technology – not all electricity capacity – based on annual time series data).
Energy storage technologies are undergoing advancement due to significant investments in R&D and commercial applications. For example, work performed for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory provides cost and performance characteristics for several different battery energy storage (BES) technologies (Mongird et al. 2019). Figure 26.
The report provides a survey of potential energy storage technologies to form the basis for evaluating potential future paths through which energy storage technologies can improve the utilization of fossil fuels and other thermal energy systems.
Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) is a key option to provide flexibility and reliability in a future decarbonized power system. A variety of mature and nascent LDES technologies hold promise for grid-scale applications, but all face a significant barrier—cost.
The findings demonstrate that the journey to our definition of widespread commercialisation takes between two and four decades for most of the products and technologies reviewed. The median time taken from invention to widespread commercialisation was 32 years. Fig. 5 orders the innovations by the duration of their innovation journey.