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WASHINGTON — The Department of Energy announced a new effort Wednesday to tackle one of the toughest technical challenges facing President Biden’s crackdown on a solar and wind-dominated power grid — namely, what to do when the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing.

The government is pursuing a promising but uncertain solution: a low-cost way to store solar or wind-generated electricity for hours, days or even weeks, and save it for when it’s most needed. This goes far beyond what current batteries can do. While there are dozens of companies working on different ideas For so-called “long-term energy storage” most of them are still too expensive to be useful.

As part of its initiative, the Department of Energy wants to bring the cost of long-term storage 90 percent below the cost of today’s lithium-ion batteries by 2030. The agency will direct experts in its national laboratories to focus on developing such technologies. seeks Congressional funding for early demonstration projects.

The announcement is part of the agency Energy Earthshots InitiativeIt aims to accelerate the deployment of emerging technologies to combat climate change. The program is a confirmation that the United States has not yet fully developed all the technologies it needs to meet Mr. Biden’s goal of zeroing the country’s planet-warming emissions by 2050.

“If we want to achieve net zero emissions, we don’t just need to deploy already proven solutions like wind and solar power,” Energy Minister Jennifer Granholm said in an interview earlier this year. “We also need to figure out how to take clean energy technologies proven in a lab and spread them around the world. There’s a real sense of urgency about it.”

Last month, Miss Granholm declared a goal Reducing the cost of clean hydrogen fuels by 80 percent, which can help reduce emissions from factories, trucks or the power grid. Both programs are modeled after the Obama era. Sunshot InitiativeIt has been credited with helping lower the cost of solar power in the 2010s and bringing the technology into the mainstream.

Mr. Biden is increasingly relying on cheaper solar and wind power to achieve his goal of ensuring the United States gets 100 percent of its electricity from power plants that don’t emit carbon dioxide by 2035. The White House is currently trying to persuade Congress. establish a clean electrical standard This will require public services nationwide to achieve this goal.

The electricity sector is responsible for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and about 60 percent of electricity is still produced by burning fossil fuels, mostly natural gas and coal. The Biden administration sees reducing electricity emissions as central to its climate plans as it tries to persuade Americans to buy more electric cars. heat pumps will be connected to this network.

But experts said cleaning up the energy sector will require more than new laws. It also brings great technological challenges.

Several recent studies we found that utilities could reasonably reach 80 percent clean electricity using today’s technology, mainly by installing many more wind turbines and solar panels and relying on existing hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactors.

But cleaning up the last 20 percent of emissions may be more difficult. One hurdle: wind and solar farms only generate power when the weather conditions are right. This means that utilities today still rely on gas or coal-burning plants as backup.

Many utilities are now installing large lithium-ion battery arrays, similar to those used in electric cars to help smooth out fluctuations in supply. But these batteries typically only store electricity for four to six hours at a time, which is insufficient to handle the larger seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar power. some parts of the country it can take days or weeks with little wind.

There are reasonable solutions, but many still have disadvantages. Grid operators could build massive new transmission lines across the country, based on the theory that somewhere the weather is often windy. But some communities they opposed the new power lines.

Utilities can also use excess wind and solar energy to generate generation. hydrogencan then be burned cleanly for electricity in times of need. This fall, the New York Electricity Authority will test this kind of “green” hydrogen It replaces some of the gas typically burned at a Long Island facility. But for now this is more expensive than burning fossil fuels like natural gas.

Another possibility is the development of new types of carbon-free power plants that can operate around the clock, such as advanced nuclear reactors, geothermal plants, or gas plants that can bury their emissions underground. But many of these technologies are still in their infancy.

Long-term storage provides another potentially useful option. Dozens of companies are experimenting various devices It can store electricity for a long time.

Some facilities are building pumped storage hydroelectric plantsAn older technology that uses electricity to pump water uphill when it’s plentiful and frees up water to spin a turbine for power in times of need. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Energy is exploring ways to inject compressed air or hydrogen into underground salt caverns that can then be used to generate power.

Other companies are working on new battery chemistries. Form Energy, a start-up backed by Bill Gates, recently announced it will be partnering with a utility in Minnesota In a pilot project to build an aqueous air battery that can provide continuous power for 150 hours.

Yet energy researchers say these long-term storage technologies must be massively cheap to be viable, in part because they will rarely work. One last study At Nature Energy, he estimates that capacity costs may need to drop to under $50 per kilowatt-hour before utilities begin to use long-term storage more widely—roughly one-third the cost of today’s grid-scale lithium-ion batteries. And this type of storage may have to get as cheap as $1 to $10 per kilowatt hour before it becomes a dominant solution.

“Achieving these cost targets will not be easy, although this is in line with what many developers aim for,” said Nestor Sepulveda, who led the research as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “A major hurdle right now is that there are no policy requirements for utilities to establish long-term storage. It is easier and cheaper to simply burn natural gas.”

Ultimately, it may take years before utilities have a clear idea of ​​what technologies work best to offset large amounts of wind and solar power. Jesse Jenkins, an expert at Princeton University, said long-term storage can play a valuable role if it’s inexpensive. But in his researchdiscovered that utilities will need to rely on a mix of different solutions for a clean grid, potentially including hydrogen or advanced emission-free power plants that can run around the clock.

Dr. “There is a lot of focus on energy storage as the Holy Grail responds to wind and solar outages,” Jenkins said. “And we saw that it could be a solution, but one of many. So we need to bet as much as possible on new technologies today so that when we really need them ten or twenty years from now, they’re ready to go.”