Battery Energy Storage as a System

We will overview decision-making in battery energy storage systems (BESS) across innovation, investment, and deployment. In this work, we apply three analytical lenses to BESS technology: learning curves, deployment costs, and economic feasibility. (1) Technology roadmap modeling - illustrated through a 6,000-scenario evaluation of sodium-ion versus lithium-ion batteries - captures both process and engineering learnings. (2) Site-level deployment costs are parameterized across civil, electrical, and installation factors, with energy density dominating system-level competitiveness. (3) Finally, a novel cumulative present value (CPV) tool assesses bankability by modeling revenue recovery against capital costs under realistic operating conditions, enabling comparison across multiple chemistries.

Speaker: William Chueh, Stanford University