Storing Solar Energy

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/solar-energy.html

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To the Editor:

Re “From Black Gold to Golden Rays” (Business Day, Feb. 6) and “Clean Power Becomes Cheap Power,” by Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey (Op-Ed, Feb. 7):

While the falling cost of solar power and wind power is welcome news, let’s not overlook the fact that these forms of generation are intermittent. Storage that can meet the demanding performance requirements of the electricity grid is the missing piece. Such batteries would allow us to draw electricity from the sun even when the sun doesn’t shine.

But those batteries, unlike anything on the market today, must be long-lived (say 20 years), safe, operationally flexible and inexpensive. Without investment in the requisite research and commercialization, we cannot expect radical innovation in this sector. We have a technological problem; it demands a technological solution.

DONALD R. SADOWAYCAMBRIDGE, MASS.

The writer is a professor of materials chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of the battery company Ambri.