Recently, as one of the two megawatt new energy storage demonstration projects in China and the largest energy storage demonstration project in China, the first phase of zhangbeifengfeng storage and transportation demonstration project in hebei province has been running safely for more than 100 days. From the current operation, the energy storage technology can meet the functional requirements of wind power and photovoltaic power generation. However, the demonstration project has exposed the economic difficulties faced by the industrialization of energy storage. According to the calculation of the demonstration project, the one-time investment of nearly 200 billion yuan is needed for all installed wind power installations in China to store energy, which will far exceed the current annual economic loss of nearly 10 billion yuan caused by "wind abandoning" in China.

It is understood that the actual life of energy storage battery is more than 5 years. In other words, the annual investment in energy storage needs to be close to 40 billion yuan to achieve the goal of not abandoning wind power. Even if the battery life could be extended to 10 years in the future, the investment to thin it down to 20 billion yuan a year would be close to that. This is clearly not a "good deal" to abandon the wind.

According to statistics from the energy bureau, by the end of 2011, China's installed wind power capacity was 47,000 megawatts, with an average annual utilization hour of 1903. Based on this calculation, the cumulative wind power generation capacity was 89 billion kilowatt-hours last year. If the on-grid electricity price of 0.5 yuan per kilowatt-hour was calculated, the actual loss of wind abandoning reached 15% to 35% was 7.852 billion yuan to 23.961 billion yuan. Therefore, abandoning the wind has become a helpless but the most economical choice at this stage.

According to the author, the economic difficulty of energy storage project lies in the lack of research and development technology of key materials of energy storage battery, which leads to high cost of energy storage battery. For domestic mainstream energy storage battery, such as lithium battery and all-vanadium liquid flow battery, the core material relies on a large number of imports and the price is high. The import dependence of lithium battery membrane is more than 80%, and the import dependence of lithium hexafluorophosphate, the core material of electrolyte, is as high as 80% ~ 90%. Perfluorine ion exchange membrane, the core component of the total vanadium liquid flow battery, is imported, and this membrane material once accounted for 50% of the cost of vanadium battery.

Obviously, the key to the industrialization of energy storage is to realize the technological breakthrough of energy storage material processing and utilization and reduce the cost of energy storage battery. In this regard, the author has two Suggestions: first, relevant research institutions and enterprises should attach importance to the research and development of key technologies of energy storage materials, strengthen the basic research of energy storage technology, and master core technologies; Second, the state should strengthen the protection of energy storage technology intellectual property rights, introduce corresponding preferential policies, and more importantly, formulate a clear medium - and long-term industrial development plan.