The future energy storage hotspot is not coal, nor iron ore, but lithium. The lightest metal in nature is probably the most important resource in the future energy landscape. China's ambitious electric vehicle program this year will greatly increase the demand for lithium, the main raw material for lithium batteries. When the number of electric vehicles reaches 1 million, China's demand for lithium will exceed the supply of existing global lithium. Others claim that the auto industry switched from oil to lithium, but from a limited resource to another limited resource. Under this logic, lithium will obviously replace oil as a symbol of wealth.

Given the dynamic growth of global lithium ore production capacity and the reduced use of lithium by lithium batteries as prompted by technology, these predictions may be too alarmist. But in China's grand electric car program, the shortage of supply has begun to emerge. About 1,000 lithium battery manufacturers are participating in the bare-boned war in China's lithium industry, which previews the battle for upstream raw materials in advance. In the upstream of the most promising lithium iron phosphate battery, the supply of lithium iron phosphate is becoming a problem. The world's largest supplier of lithium iron phosphate, Tianjin Strand, has a capacity of 2,000 tons. More than 100 companies in China are producing lithium iron phosphate at full capacity, but no more than 10 companies can produce high-quality products. They will be the upstream leaders of the lithium battery industry in the future. Finding and discovering them will also be the biggest interest of investors.

As early as 1986, when the 863 program was launched, lithium batteries were regarded as one of China's strategic industries. However, China's research has stagnated for many years, and lithium batteries have become a monopoly in Japan and the United States. Until recently, private enterprises and professional R&D institutions have come together, and the technology of lithium batteries in China has achieved a qualitative leap. On key components of lithium batteries, such as diaphragms, there are already a few companies in China that can compete with the best companies in the world.

The lithium industry is just the tip of the iceberg of the entire energy storage market. More than the electric vehicle market is the new energy grid connection and the peaking and filling of power in the city. These three are an ecosystem that are mutually exclusive. Energy storage not only ensures that the new energy power connected to the most upstream power generation is continuous and stable; at the end of the energy use, the huge demand difference between day and night also requires energy storage to cut peaks and fill the valley; and the newly added electric power In the car, some experts said that if all the existing vehicles in China are converted into electric vehicles, it would be equivalent to rebuilding a national grid system, which is a catastrophic investment. In the most ideal state, the electric vehicle should not only be used as a suction side of energy, but also can be transmitted back to the grid to regulate the peaks and valleys, which can greatly reduce the excessive construction of the grid in order to balance the load. In the ultimate energy landscape, energy storage will become the cornerstone of a distributed, intelligent and controllable energy landscape. Now, energy storage is only less than 2% of the total installed capacity. This obviously means that in the above three aspects, energy storage contains this huge business opportunity.

Lithium batteries were once considered to be applicable to the latter two. However, in the first phase of the National Wind Power Storage and Demonstration Project invested by the State Grid, the bidding for a total of 18 MW lithium iron phosphate battery energy storage system was suspended. The reason is that its cost is too high, and when the battery in the mobile phone is amplified hundreds of times, the problem of battery consistency remains unresolved. In the field of large-scale energy storage, the limelight is the most suitable for sodium-sulfur batteries, and its energy density is close to that of lithium batteries, and there is no consistency problem. Similar to this, the representative vanadium battery of the flow battery is gradually recognized as more suitable for large-scale energy storage applications. In the former, the State Grid Corporation is close to industrialization. The latter, on behalf of the company such as Pune, through the acquisition of foreign leading technology owners, became one of the most competitive battery companies in the world, and thus won a total of more than 30 million US dollars in venture capital three rounds of investment.

In fact, there is no perfect product in the battery field. Lead-acid battery, stable performance but short life, and energy density is too small; sodium-sulfur battery must guarantee 300 °C operating temperature; vanadium battery, energy density is too low. The most test of entrepreneurs is to find a market for these batteries to avoid disadvantages. For example, vanadium batteries have low energy density and large volume, but the structure of the flow battery can make it repeat and long-term rapid charge and discharge. Therefore, it is naturally suitable for large-scale new energy storage that is not sensitive to the floor space, rather than the peak-filling of valleys in the city, not the narrow space of electric vehicles; for example, lead-acid batteries that are regarded as backward products, because The price is low, but it is likely to be applied to the primary electric vehicle in the rural market where there is no charging pile problem. With the cultivation of the market, these pragmatic companies have tickets to upgrade more advanced products. Therefore, investors in this field may have to be vigilant about the principle of technology supremacy. Companies that have a keen judgment on the application path of the product and that have an innovative business model also have investment value.

At this point, we are still talking about the hottest solutions in the energy storage solution, but only a small part.

Following the principle of energy storage: electricity - other energy - the path of electricity, electricity can be converted into chemical energy, potential energy, kinetic energy, electromagnetic energy and other forms of storage. The physical energy storage includes pumped storage, compressed air energy storage and flywheel energy storage; electromagnetic energy storage includes superconducting, supercapacitor and high energy density capacitor energy storage; electrochemical energy storage includes lead acid, nickel hydrogen, nickel cadmium, lithium ion Battery storage energy such as sodium sulfur and liquid flow; phase change energy storage includes ice storage and energy storage.

With the rapid start of the energy storage market, some traditional energy storage technologies are making a comeback. In early July, Yingli New Energy Chairman Miao Liansheng announced in Hainan that Yingli is developing a new generation of flywheel energy storage. Flywheel energy storage converts power into high-speed rotating flywheel kinetic energy and uses a flywheel to drive generators to generate electricity when needed. It was used in power storage experiments in Japan and the United States in the 1990s, but there have been no large-scale energy storage applications to date. The flywheel has regained its attention, thanks to the breakthrough in magnetic levitation using high temperature superconductors. This makes the magnetic suspension bearing possible, which can eliminate the bearing friction loss; secondly, the appearance of high-strength materials such as carbon fiber can make the flywheel have higher rotation speed, so that the flywheel can store more energy.

The application prospect of phase change energy storage - building energy conservation is more imaginative. China's building energy consumption accounts for more than 30% of total energy consumption. Although phase storage energy storage such as ice storage and cold storage cannot store electricity, it can regulate heat. Combined with passive energy-saving technology, it can solve building energy-saving problems on a large scale and cheaply. For China, this is a more cost-effective energy-saving and emission-reduction path than electric vehicles. In places where there is restraint and rational planning for a low-carbon economy, such as Shanghai, building energy efficiency is receiving government policy support. In the field of public and commercial buildings that are easy to promote, there is obviously a lot of opportunities for phase change energy storage.