IEEE Electrification - December 2021 - 78

VIEWPOINT
Scaling up to Long-Duration Storage
material costs have slowed the pace
of recent cost reductions, and the
long-term needs of the power grid
may require more duration than is
cost-effectively achievable with a
cell-type battery. To explore this
question, this article examines
trends from adjacent industries.
Examining Historic Parallels
In charting where the large-scale,
stationary storage industry may
journey, some historical parallels
may be helpful. Although disruptions
are to be expected in any
accelerating field, the manner in
which new technologies become
established can inform the development
of long-duration storage
today. What follows are encapsulations
of three other industries in
various stages of disruption: lighting,
currently experiencing a transition;
computing, in a state with a
dominant technology; and power
generation, in a state with no dominant
technology.
(continued from page 84)
In 1992, William Nordhaus analyzed
measures of wage growth over
time. He wanted to develop a standard
measure of output that could
transcend " periods of major technological
change. " In an interview with
National Public Radio, Nordhaus
explained the increase in terms of
light for a day's work, highlighting
the process of disruptive innovation
over time.
For most of history, artificial light
was provided by burning some form
of wax, fat, or oil. A day's work would
provide enough value for roughly
150 lmh from a candle, equivalent to
a couple of hours from an incandescent
light bulb. In the mid-1800s, kerosene
and gas lighting arrived, and
provided an order-of-magnitude
improvement in the amount of light,
offering approximately 5 h for a day's
work. The incandescent lamp, in turn,
replaced burned fuels, and by the
1990s, a day's labor was enough for
roughly 20,000 h of lighting. Despite
some promising improvements with
fluorescent lighting, today's lighting is
increasingly dominated by solid-state
lighting or LEDs, which light up for
50,000 h-enough for a lifetime-
under the same metric. According to
an August 2020 U.S. Department of
Energy (DOE) lighting report, LEDs
reached 30% of the overall lighting
market by 2018, and as shown in Figure
1, are approaching 100% adoption
in key applications such as traffic signals
and exit signs.
As with lighting, modern computTraffic
Signals
100
80
60
40
Low/High Bay
20
Figure 1. The 2018 installed adoption of LED lighting applications. (Source: U.S. Department
of Energy.)
78
IEEE Electrification Magazine / DECEMBER 2021
Decorative
Connected
Lighting
Horticultural
Lighting
Directional
Building Exterior
Street/Roadway
Parking Lot
Parking Garage
Overall
A-Type
Linear Fixture
Exit Signs
Refrigerator Case
Display
ing has experienced multiple " eras " -
pioneered by vacuum tubes,
subsequently displaced by discrete
transistors, and now dominated by
silicon-based microprocessors. Jonathan
Koomey, with a team from Lawrence
Berkeley National Lab, Stanford
University, Microsoft, and Intel,
chronicled the advancement in computation.
They gauged their progress
by measuring the number of calculations
achievable per unit of electricity.
In 1946, the first programmable
computer, an electronic numerical
integrator and computer (ENIAC),
provided 437 computations/kWh. By
2009, a consumer-grade multicore
processor delivered nearly a quadrillion
calculations per kilowatthour.
Despite the somewhat slower
growth of the 1960s discrete transistor
era, the rate-of-efficiency gains
from ENIAC through modern PCs
was fairly constant, doubling roughly
every 1.6 yr. Figure 2 depicts how
each new generation of computing
technology fully displaced the previous
generation.
In contrast with silicon-dominated
computing, U.S. power generation
provides an example of a sector that
has reached a state with multiple
technologies. An internal DOE
analysis adapted the Herfindahl-
Hirschman index (HHI), primarily a
measure of market concentration, to
market " shares " of various fuels. By
modeling all the generators of a
(%)

IEEE Electrification - December 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Electrification - December 2021