5 green building trends: Energy storage a bigger piece in renewable energy puzzle

To be sure, the battery and energy storage industry faces big challenges. Price, performance, capacity and a limited supply of key materials still raise questions about scalabilty. Most experts agree that current technologies for batteries, fuel cells and other energy storage products lack the capacity it would take to build a 100 percent renewable-energy grid at anything approaching a realistic cost. But venture capitalists are funding efforts to find long-term solutions in a big way. The prospective technologies range from salt-water batteries to compressed-air cells to ingenuous schemes that are too complicated to get into here. The biggest single chunk of private money is coming from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a billion-dollar fund backed by Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos and Jack Maa among others. Breakthrough’s top investment objective: “incredibly cheap grid-scale storage with a very long calendar life.