The following is a contributed article by Emily Goldfield, a Clean Energy Leadership Institute fellow and an MBA student at the Wharton School of Business. She previously worked for RMI and cleantech startup Myst AI.
It’s not news that the market for stationary energy storage is growing. With demand driven by ambitious policies in the U.S. and Europe, energy storage installations around the world are expected to reach nearly 1,200 GWh by 2030, a 15X increase from the amount of storage that was online at the end of 2021.
Lithium-ion batteries are expected to continue to dominate this market at least until the 2030s. However, global lithium shortages pose a challenge. The cost of lithium has increased 13-fold in the past two years. The majority of raw lithium is being sold for EV batteries, leaving even less supply…