24 | Kieran Claffey — Senior Research Engineer, Southern Company

About this episode

Kieran Claffey discusses the key metrics for energy storage technology and the limitations of lithium-ion batteries with Nate Kirchhofer.

🏭 For the electric utilities, what is the most important metric for energy storage technology? What is the rule of 17%? What is dunkelflaute?! For answers, we turn to Kieran Claffey of Southern Company in discussion with BioZen's CEO Nate Kirchhofer. To add some weight to Kieran's opinion, consider that as of 2021, Southern Company is the second largest utility company in the US, serving 9 million gas and electric customers in 6 states and delivering electricity to 120,000 square miles of territory.The Department of Energy targets a $0.05/kWh levelized cost of storage (LCOS) as a key performance parameter for energy storage technology. Kieran emphasizes that utilities instead employ a comprehensive approach considering approximately 30 parameters, including geographic flexibility, energy density, power density, and lots more. The most important? Reliability, and CapEx.Kieran highlights the utilities' need for safe and cost-effective 10-hour duration batteries, which is (and will likely continue to be) beyond lithium-ion's capabilities , even though Li-ion will serve mobile applications and durations <6 h. This insight is possible because Kieran is a subject matter expert in…

People in this episode

Host: Nate Kirchhofer

Guest: Kieran Claffey

Topics covered

• energy storage technology
• utility metrics
• reliability
• cost-effective batteries
• lithium-ion limitations

Keywords

• energy storage
• reliability
• cost of storage
• lithium-ion
• utilities
• batteries

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Southern Company, Department of Energy, BioZen Batteries

Books & works: Hazard

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