Why Long Duration Storage Matters

By definition, as the squirrels understand, storage needs to get you “through the winter”. All the below highlighted presently available Energy Storage means are by nature not only cheap but can be stockpiled for long duration. So, the natural feasibility selection conclusion is that LDES needs to be Cheap / Affordable.

And, if you do not have a long period of discharge (Duration), can it really be called “storage”? You store to get you through the gaps. This is just like a Medieval Castle having enough food and water for a 12months siege. If an average siege was months and the knight said to the townsfolk “don’t worry, we have water and food for one day”… do they really have any “stores” in the Castle?

Why Deploy-Ability Matters

For efficiency we need to locate the Storage where the Wind and Solar Farms are.

Further it is clear now that the future will be Distributed Energy (Behind the Meter or on Site of need).

This is due to a combination of several critical factors, the first being the Grid transmission is now too costly to upgrade (Western Australia announced it will move to On Site Distributed Energy Hubs), the second being the massive power needs of Data Server Centres (one Centre can be 500MW Capacity Need being half the output of the famous Hoover Dam) cannot be handled by the Grid. The Third and Forth factors are it makes sense to locate Storage where either the Massive Trillion dollar investment of VRE Generation is already located ,or where there is massive concentrated new demand for On Demand Energy Consumption being the said >500MW+ Data Centres… They will need to “Bring Their Own” / BYO power or go where large power generation is located. This has seen the surge in Nuclear Power and Small Modular Reactors (“Deployable” SMR) with Microsoft already having over 1000MW of Nuclear Capacity.

The natural course of sense of this transition can be seen in the parallel of transition from Land Line Phones to Mobil Phone Cell Nets, where also Land Line upgrade was impossible and the Hub of near use Cell Nets, offered the efficient and natural transition.    

Obviously, Affordability Matters and the Market is Very Big

Because of the Trillion Dollar Rush to globally deploy VRE (that does not work or at least does not do what it was intended to replace - it is not On-Demand Power) AND at the same time close down cheap On-Demand Fossil Fuel generation, the Capacity Gap has increased demand Need as the supply side falls. Therefore, Grid prices have risen 300% in the last decade (it was not the Wars).

Market Demand / Need will now explode exponentially (its literally “going Nuclear”) with the Intense Compute consumption requirements will be to present total Grid Capacity, in only 3years!

This makes the Internet Boom of 2000 look like a pop compared to this AI Boom (or Internet 2.0). While Internet 1.0 saw the rise of the MULTI TRILLION $$$ GAMAM (Google/Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon & Co) “service Companies”, Internet 2.0 AI Power Needs will see the rise of Power Utilities as the new 21st Century Global Commodity is Deployable Energy Generated (dumb electrons) AI Information Tokens (Smart Electrons) in the Internet of Everything”. Energy no longer needs Cables & Wires it can be easily distributed in the ether (fibre or satellite). Delivery or Distribution is a core attribute of a tradable mega global commodity (like Oil or Coal).

Firm [Fix] the broken Wind & Solar “Variable [Unreliable] Renewable Energy System… that we just dropped >TRILLION $$$ Into…

TORC Clean Energy offers Variable Renewable Energy (“VRE”) an Affordable and Deployable Firming (VRE to On-Demand) Solution.

Wind & Solar is useless for the On-Demand Needs of Industry, specifically the transformational “Intense Compute” Data Server and AI Factory Sector, fast becoming the 21st Essential Utility and largest Commercial Power consuming Sector in the World.

There is no affordable “Firming” of Wind and Solar (Variable or more appropriately “Unreliable” Renewable Energy). Batteries by their nature (no decoupling of energy from power) are too costly for Long Duration needs (over 20hours) and only used for “Smoothing” (15-45 minutes)

TORC gained ARENA Grant approval for a system whose componentry is Off-The-Shelf but whose configuration and storage medium (PCM) is unique and state of the art.

In the Case of Clean Power Generation, the Power Need Gap to be stored for is when Wind & Solar “VARIABLE Renewable Energy” does not work. We need LDES to “Firm” (make work On-Demand) the Gap. Really “Firm” is a polite term for “Fix”.

The massive contribution to date to additional Power-Gen Capacity is Wind & Solar.

However, its contribution to Yield (its usefulness) does not even make the above list. And as seen by no shift in the West’s Clean Energy Emissions but Grid prices spiking by 500%, there has been no “Clean Energy Transition” / improvement at all in Clean Power Generation consumption.

This is because as the label of “Variable Renewable Energy” suggests, is it unreliable working on annual average only at best 5 hours of any 24hour day (obviously solar does not work at night but also neither in cloud cover and when it rains – that we also need…).

Really its label should be “Unreliable Renewable Power”.

And when the sun does shine, we have so much VRE Capacity now, that during the 5hour window of generation, a vast proportion of the VRE Capacity is not needed and leads to negative tariffs or solar blocking called politely “Solar Constraint” – those squirrels’ nuts are rotting on the forest floor…

We need to take this energy and store it.

To “Firm” this massive TRILLION Dollar Capacity Investment, we obviously need to bridge the gap of the minimum time VRE does not work (18hrs in 24hr day) and the 5.5 hours of operation (ARENA stated Annual average). Hence the Long Duration Gap. Let us just round to 20 hours.

ARENA and Australian Government define Long Duration as >8 hours. But surely intuitively on operation of VRE, that does not make sense and 20hours a better conservative goal or at least a starting point (also need to store for days of “wind or sun droughts”).