Keith Lovegrove of ITP Thermal warns that Australia’s energy storage sector risks over-reliance on lithium-ion batteries, advocating diversification into long-duration technologies such as solar thermal, pumped hydro and hydrogen storage to ensure grid stability as coal plants retire.
Australia’s energy storage sector risks over-reliance on lithium-ion technology at the expense of long-duration alternatives better suited to grid stability once coal plants retire, according to Keith Lovegrove, managing director of consultancy ITP Thermal.
While acknowledging lithium-ion’s dominance across residential, transport and grid-scale applications, Lovegrove, who spoke to ESN Premium at the Energy Storage Summit Australia 2026 in March, says the industry must consider how to achieve an optimal technology mix that includes systems with lower costs per unit of stored energy duration.
“The developments are this enormous juggernaut of lithium-ion battery storage systems in the home, in the car and everywhere – it’s incredible and it’s transformative,” Lovegrove says.
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“But there is a risk with that, and that is that we miss some benefits of diversification.”
Lovegrove, whose consultancy specialises in thermal systems and has extensive experience in concentrating solar thermal technology, notes a fundamental distinction between storage technologies optimised for power delivery and those suited to extended-duration applications.
“The lithium-ion battery storage has quite a low cost per kilowatt, so they kind of win there,” he explains. “But other things like solar thermal, like pumped hydro, like some of the long-duration energy storage (LDES) things, they have a really low cost of adding duration to the storage, and that’s what we’re going to need when all the coal plants retire.”
When asked which technologies might emerge as alternatives to lithium-ion over the next 10 to 15 years, Lovegrove acknowledges uncertainty driven by industry momentum and visibility rather than purely technical merit.
“It’s so much about the positive feedback of an industry getting big, and then there are people who work in it, people who promote the projects. It’s the most visible thing, so it becomes the thing that dominates,” he says.
Pumped hydro remains a certainty for deployment, Lovegrove notes, while solar thermal with thermal storage is “going extremely well in China, which is interesting and ironic.”
“That’s the home of lithium batteries and the home of PV panels. So, if they’re building solar thermal with thermal storage, they must see the value in that,” he says. “That value is the long-duration storage that it brings.”
Solar thermal systems typically incorporate thermal storage in molten-salt tanks, providing built-in long-duration capability that differs fundamentally from lithium-ion’s architecture.
Hydrogen storage and export potential
Beyond established technologies, Lovegrove identifies hydrogen storage as a potential long-term solution, though he remains cautious about near-term deployment timelines.
“The one to watch, if horse racing allows you something from left field, that would be storage of hydrogen. I think that’s got a very big future,” he says. “Will it happen in the next 10 years? Open question. But it’s going to happen, and in our lifetimes, I think.”
Lovegrove’s interest in hydrogen extends to Australia’s potential role as a renewable energy exporter, particularly through hydrogen derivatives such as ammonia.
“I cannot see how we can decarbonise the whole world without a tradable zero emissions thing that we can put in ships, because some countries simply will never make their own energy economically,” he explains.
“Whereas countries like Australia, our economy depends on selling coal and natural gas to other people – we need to swap that out for something with zero emissions.”
Ammonia appeals as an energy vector due to its liquid state at manageable pressures, enabling more efficient maritime transport than gaseous hydrogen.
Despite recent setbacks in Australia’s hydrogen export ambitions, Lovegrove maintains that the opportunity remains substantial, provided the country establishes domestic demand first.
“We just experienced a sort of pendulum swing of fashion. All of a sudden, hydrogen was the silver bullet going to solve every problem, everything, and then suddenly it wasn’t,” he says.
“The truth is always somewhere in the middle.”
Renewables gas target and salt cavern storage
Lovegrove advocates for a renewable gas target modelled on Australia’s renewable electricity target, which successfully scaled solar PV and wind deployment.
“If Australia wants to play the renewable energy superpower export role, we have to start by getting a domestic market going,” he says.
“You start small, but it’s mandated, and it doesn’t really matter what the price is to start with. It’s mandated, and volume brings price reductions. It’s just guaranteed that it will.”
On hydrogen storage technologies specifically, Lovegrove distinguishes between conventional high-pressure vessels and underground cavern storage, which he says offers cost advantages that could enable seasonal storage applications.
“The standard way is just a pressure vessel, like compressed air or something else at very high pressures,” he explains. “But that’s not particularly cheap.”
Salt cavern storage involves identifying large underground salt deposits and dissolving cavities the size of multi-story buildings, which can then be pressurised to 200 atmospheres with hydrogen.
“That’s so cheap per amount of storage that we can actually start to think about seasonal storage, saving our solar energy from summer to winter,” Lovegrove says. “Salt caverns are much more common than people realise, but they’re not everywhere, of course.”
The technology represents one approach to addressing the duration gap between lithium-ion systems, typically deployed for 2-4 hour applications, and the multi-day or seasonal storage requirements anticipated as coal generation exits the grid.
Interested in Australia? Read Energy-Storage.news’ Energy Storage Summit Australia coverage and related content.
