Material Insights · Understanding the Material World

Superconducting magnetic storage: Economics

Why no one has a current price for this technology

What this tab covers Economics and financial structure: capital versus operating cost, levelised cost of storage, and how the asset earns money.

There is no recent, credible capital or levelised cost for grid SMES. All cost figures below are historical (1999 to 2010) and are labelled as such. The only commercial grid use was a niche voltage-support product about 25 years ago, and our search found no newer grid deployment.

Capex versus opex

Unfavourable

Published cost data are old (historical data, not current prices). In 1999 Wisconsin Public Service bought six distributed SMES units from American Superconductor for about USD 4 million to stabilise voltage on its Northern Loop, against USD 6 to 15 million estimated for alternatives. Refrigeration is about 10 to 15% of system cost and is also the main running cost, because the cold must be maintained whether or not the unit is used.24

Wisconsin D-SMES cost (historical, 1999) USD 4 million for 6 units4 Alternative solutions (historical, 1999 estimate) USD 6 to 15 million4 Refrigeration share of system cost (thesis estimate, uncited) about 10 to 15%2

Levelised cost of storage

Unfavourable

We found no published levelised cost of storage for SMES from IEA, Lazard, NREL or PNNL; it is not included in their standard comparisons. Given conductor costs in the millions of dollars per kWh (calculated from Brookhaven data), any per-MWh figure would be far above batteries.3

Revenue stack and market participation

Unfavourable

SMES suits power quality and stability services: voltage recovery after sags, damping power swings (the 1979 BPA unit damped 0.35 Hz oscillations at 10 MW), uninterruptible supply for sensitive factories, and pulsed power. These are mostly bilateral contracts with utilities or industrial users, not traded markets. Where ancillary markets exist they are small, historically under 5% of US wholesale market value, and batteries and supercapacitors now compete for the same work.146

BPA SMES (1979) 10 MW, 30 MJ stored (historical; ran about a year)1 Ancillary services share of US wholesale market value under 5%6

Sources

  1. SMES (Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage): present status and future (P. Tixador, Grenoble INP / CNRS) (historical, 2011) Energy Research Forum (ERF), conference presentation, Lund, 2011
  2. Review of applications of superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) to power systems (M. Fadly, MPhil thesis; secondary source) University of Strathclyde, 2021
  3. HTS SMES design for ARPA-E project with ABB (R. Gupta) (historical, 2010) Brookhaven National Laboratory, 2010
  4. D-SMES for Wisconsin (historical trade article, 1999) Modern Power Systems, 1999
  5. Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Virtual Power Plants US Department of Energy, 2023