Grid-scale batteries and the politics of storage

Abstract

From Tesla’s experimental ‘Virtual Power Plants’ to the US’s Energy Storage Grand Challenge, grid-scale batteries – which attach to the electricity grid to buffer supply and demand – are sites of intensifying research, speculation and legislation. They are increasingly positioned as a transformative means to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Indeed, batteries are not the only form of storage in the spotlight: A variety of stored forms, including seed banks, metals stockpiles, and sequestered carbon dioxide have become central in generating, and ameliorating, anxieties about environmental futures. ‘Storage’ offers a potent analytic to analogize phenomena across scales and contexts, in part because of the increasingly visible status of its emic instantiations. As a means to store electricity, a uniquely ephemeral commodity, batteries, like other stored forms, both mediate power and capital and can defuse political potency. Though batteries can smooth the integration of renewable energy into the grid by disciplining the unruly schedules of sun and wind, their potentials (and proponents) extend to the fossil fuel industry as well: They are ‘fuel-neutral’, allowing all kinds of electrons to become more cost-efficient. In these multivalent contexts, I suggest, securing the status and value of a battery’s stored electricity, or trading on its ambiguity, can signal and effect political agendas, even as such arbitrations can recast politics in a techno-juridical domain.