Ducks and Fireflies

This is "The Duck Curve" showing demand made on the energy grid over the day extrapolated out over years. It is a great worry to managers, politicians and business people (but not voters yet) as it exposes the vulnerability of energy sources to asynchronous use.

There is a strong argument that can be made that energy storage is the bottleneck in our energy growth and that solving it will unleash a myriad of new energy sources. Wind and solar, for example, can be converted to energy but not reliably. Thus the search for storage alternatives. Firefly is a small company with an innovation in the lead-acid electrode; it attempts to improve function with an increase in its surface area. (While I am interested in batteries and invest in them, I have no interest in Firefly.) Kurtis Kelley of Firefly International Energy Co. wrote a white paper on the current direction and implications of federal funding of energy storage. It is, in many ways, typical of comments in the past written by observers watching the distortion of the research and market place caused by ignorant, biased and crony investing by government. This is an excerpt:

"Writing this paper has been particularly difficult. We really have two goals; first, to express concern

about the potential for one-sided efforts at the new Illinois Battery Research Center and, second, to
dispel some myths and show you why advanced lead-acid chemistry, often overlooked, is so much
better than believed. We, at Firefly in Illinois, are very concerned about what technologies will receive focus in the new facility at our back door; and if this is going to be just a repeat of the $2B federal investment in batteries from just a few years ago. We are concerned, for the sake of this country, that we will see more misguided focus on “flavor-of-the-day” technologies rather than taking an objective approach to solving our grid and energy issues. I don't believe we need to go over specific misjudgments involving that $2B investment, but we are wondering, are we doing it again with this new center?

Poor decisions in these government-funded ventures are more hurtful than you realize. We all recall

that $2B U.S. federal funding of several battery technologies, overwhelmingly of lithium. What is not known is some of the side effects of those technology decisions that were enormously harmful to this country's other evolving battery technologies. In the eyes of battery investors, the federal government had just “voted” on which technologies were good and which were bad, assuming that the decision makers in Washington were qualified to do so. Investors quickly drew back from some promising technologies and jumped to the federally funded technologies. Meanwhile the unsubsidized companies struggled to find even private funding. New lead-acid technologies were largely ignored and some small companies were accused of lying about test data. Venture investors reinvested in failing, “federally identified” technologies with no ROI. Firefly is a case in point, and the response letter that Firefly sent to the DOE, challenging each point for denial of funding in detail, went ignored.

Why was it ignored? Embarrassment? Were the companies being funded already chosen and excuses

manufactured to deny the others?"