Dive Brief:
- LG Energy Solution Vertech, a subsidiary of South Korea-based LG Corporation, plans to build 10 grid-scale battery storage facilities to collectively store 10 gigawatt hours of capacity in the United States this year, the company announced last month.
- LG Energy Solution, a global lithium-ion battery manufacturer and branch of LG’s chemical company, is also planning to build a battery manufacturing complex in Arizona. The complex is a two-facility project: One to create batteries for electric vehicles and the other to make batteries for energy storage systems.
- As energy storage is becoming increasingly important for the country’s renewable energy approach, the grid scale battery storage market is expected to reach 30 GWh total in 2024, according to Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association’s 2023 Q4 energy storage report.
Dive Insight:
The portfolio of facilities will help avoid the equivalent of 8 million pounds of coal or 16 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions each year, the company calculated using the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies calculator.
Jaehong Park, the company’s CEO and president, said the awards aligned with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which included $369 billion in climate and renewable energy spending.
The climate bill “further strengthens [the company’s] view that the US energy storage industry is set for sustained growth especially as large-scale battery manufacturing plants come on-line within the next 2-3 years,” Park said in the release.
The company, created by LG Energy Solution’s acquisition of NEC Energy Solutions, said the spate of projects planned for the year represent more than five times the total energy storage projects NEC Energy Solutions had completed before the acquisition. Park added that the awards bring credibility to the company’s vertical integration approach to the market.
All 10 projects will have lithium-ion batteries from LG Energy Solutions, with LG Energy Solutions Vertech providing all hardware integration, system controls software and related services. Additionally, the company’s AEROS software will be used on site to give users site performance analytics and supervisory and controls services.
LG Energy Solution’s head of energy storage systems business division, Hyung Kim, said one of the Queen Creek, Arizona facilities will focus on creating long-cell based lithium-ion phosphate batteries with enhanced energy density and security. The facility will create grid-scale batteries with 16 GWhs of capacity.
As investments in renewable energies like solar and wind power have grown, so has the importance of energy storage capabilities to store and distribute that power evenly outside of peak generation hours. McKinsey and Company estimates utility-scale energy storage will represent up to 90 percent of the battery market by 2030, compared to residential and commercial and industrial storage.
Correction: In a previous version of this article, the expected capacity of the energy storage market was misstated. It is expected to reach 30 gigawatt hours total in 2024.
