Why energy storage is cool (and unclear)

I’m going to be upfront about it and say I became a geek of energy storage. If you want to dive in too, I recommend starting with the podcast “Redefining Energy” and the course “The Science of Energy” (here on audible).

In the last few months, I’ve gone through nearly every alley in the climate-tech world. Energy storage is the first market I have found that has both crazy growth, good money to be made, and an opportunity to fundamentally impact the future of humanity. Somehow, it still looks pretty bad on and off the stock market.

Humanity consumes ~160 thousand tWh per year (that’s a lot) and the existing storage capacity in the world does not reach 0.0000001 of that. If we want to transfer 20–30% of the world to solar & wind, storage capacity (including efficiency improvements) must grow by a factor of at least one million. There aren’t many more business opportunities like that one in the world today, including AI, in my humble opinion.

What I really like about the field, is that the challenge is not political (as in transportation, another hobby of mine) nor is it economic (as in ag-tech or nature protection) but technological. It’s hard to store energy, so it’s expensive, and that’s why we still burn oil.

How expensive is it? Producing kWh from a solar panel today costs ~$0.02 and storing this energy for at least half a day costs tens or hundreds of dollars more. Totally fucked up. The attached graph is intended only for the brave, but you can trust me that the most efficient storage project in the world reached $16 per kWh and most projects were at the $300–400 range.

In Israel, so they say, there’s talent density. There is also money here waiting to be invested in energy and energy storage, and there is even a sandbox to work on. Theoretically, Israel’s energy storage technology market should have been exploding. Unfortunately, leading Israeli storage companies are performing (very) poorly.

Globally, I found that Nextera went up 87% in the last 5 years, Enphase by 3500%, Brookfield by 93%. So there is a market for the better companies in the space. I also found an interesting trend of former military & defense industry leaders transferring into management roles in storage tech companies.

And now my question is: did Israeli companies bet on the wrong technologies, or maybe the stock market in Israel is just not accustomed to handling the long cycles in the field… Or, is it that everyone was right and it’s not feasible to build a hardware company in Israel?
I hope they were wrong, and I hope the TLV stock exchange will be better in the future in dealing with those kinds of companies. do not think so. I hope some of the existing technologies will improve and that a few new ones will emerge (sodium batteries is what you’d want to google).
Stay tuned, I’ll try to write more about that soon.