Grid-scale batteries do not currently reduce emissions. Here's how they could.
Energy storage as deployed on the US grid today has a dirty secret — it actually increases carbon emissions. In this episode, Tierra Climate founders Jacob Mansfield and Emma Konet discuss their vision to incentivize emission reductions by making batteries and other energy storage eligible for carbon offset.
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David Roberts
It is widely understood that decarbonizing the grid will require a large amount of energy storage. What is much less widely understood is that batteries on the grid today are generally not reducing carbon emissions — indeed, their day-to-day operation often has the effect of increasing them.
Yes, you heard me right: most batteries on today's grid are responsible for net positive carbon emissions.
I was quite disturbed when I first found out about this, mostly through the research of Eric Hittinger at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and I wrote a piece on it on Vox way back in 2018.
Contemporary research suggests that nothing has changed in the ensuing five years — most batteries still behave in a way that increases emissions. But a new startup called Tierra Climate is trying to change that. It wants to incentivize emission-reducing behavior in batteries by making it an eligible carbon offset.
Just as a renewable energy producers can make extra money through the sale of renewable energy credits (RECs), battery operators could make extra money through the sale of carbon offsets on the voluntary market — but only if they change the way they operate.
It’s an intriguing idea and the only real solution I’ve seen proposed to a problem that no one else is even talking about. So I wanted to chat with founders Jacob Mansfield and Emma Konet about why batteries increase emissions today, what incentive they would need to change their behavior, and what’s required to set up an offset product. And yes, I recall that Volts recently featured an episode extremely critical of carbon offsets — we’ll get into that too.
So, then, with no further ado, Jacob Mansfield and Emma Konet. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Emma Konet
Thanks for having us.
David Roberts
Emma, let's start with you. You worked at a battery company before jumping to this startup. Let's walk through a few basics here. Let's just start with this question. If I'm an investor and I want to build a big battery and attach it to the grid, how would I make money? What are the sort of routes through which I could make income with a battery?
Emma Konet
So batteries typically have three ways in which they make money. The first one is, I think, what everyone traditionally thinks of a battery doing, and it's called energy arbitrage. And basically that just means that a battery buys power when the price is low and it sells power when the price is high.
David Roberts
Right.
Emma Konet
And the difference between those prices is what the battery is paid. Of course, some energy is lost through the process of storing it, and so batteries are not 100% efficient. So that's kind of the traditional idea of how batteries operate. But that's actually not really what a lot of batteries are doing on the grid today. Instead they provide what are called ancillary services and those are basically products that help to keep the grid frequency at 60 Hz. It's really important for reliability, just in everyday power grid operations, that that happens and the grid operates more efficiently when it's in a tighter band, around 60 Hz.
Batteries are really good at providing those pro
