17 | Mark Wanamaker — Business Development Manager, Lockheed Martin Energy Storage

0️⃣ What's your favorite zero-emission load following dispatchable resource to enable green baseload? What even *is* green baseload?! For this episode, Mark Wanamaker of Lockheed Martin Energy Storage joins BioZen Batteries' CEO Nate Kirchhofer to discuss one possible answer to that question: Lockheed Martin's GridStar™ Flow Batteries!

This technology was acquired from MIT-spinout Sun Catalytics in 2014 and has been under development since then, and the aqueous electrolytes can't catch fire, don't degrade based on use case or state of charge (SOC), and don't need thermal management, all serving to lower the cost. Lockheed Martin was also recently awarded a 1 MW / 10 MWh project at Fort Carson Army Base run by the Department of Defence Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center Construction Engineering Research Lab (DOD ACE ERDC CERL), an encouraging pilot microgrid project.

Flow batteries are typically thought of as long-duration (>6 hour discharge) energy storage, but Mark makes the case that they are even economically viable for replacing gas peaker plants or combined cycle plants too. Mark shares a key insight that energy storage system developers need to simultaneously consider bankability, flexibility, future adaptability to changing markets, and separation of Power and Energy capacity to tailor a storage system—in addition to more conventional metrics like levelized cost of storage (LCOS) or capex measured in $/kWh. The DOE thinks flow batteries need to get under $0.05/kWh, and we think we can!

Recorded 6 September 2023.

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