NEWS | I N D E P T H
dent Barack Obama’s administration later
lifted those restrictions.)
CIRM initially expected to focus on human
embryonic stem cells, but later expanded its
remit to more specialized adult stem cells
such as those that form blood or the increas-
ingly popular induced pluripotent stem cells,
created by reprogramming adult cells to an
embryolike state. CIRM’s money led to the
creation of major stem cell centers in Cali-
fornia and lured several biotech companies
to set up shop in the state. Although CIRM
supported infrastructure, basic research, and
training early on, in the past 3 years it has
poured most of its remaining $759 million
into clinical trials—a total of 55 of which are
ongoing or completed to date—as the agency
faced pressure to produce the medical treat-
ments its supporters were initially promised.
In a memo to its board released on
20 June, CIRM said it had received applica-
tions totaling $88 million in its latest funding
call but had only $33 million left to distrib-
ute. The agency announced the next day that
it was taking no new grant applications as
of 28 June, aside from a sickle cell disease
program jointly funded with NIH. “There is
no money available for new projects,” CIRM
communications director Kevin McCormack
wrote in a 1 July blog post.
Some researchers who explore the ba-
sic science of stem cells had already been
looking for other funding sources as CIRM
began to emphasize clinical work and their
support wound down. But others, espe-
cially those planning clinical trials, will be
hit hard. “It’s going to be a huge impact on
my lab and many others if they end,” says
April Pyle of UC Los Angeles (UCLA), whose
11-person group works on using muscle
stem cells to treat muscular dystrophy. Her
last CIRM grant ends in March 2020 and
although she also has some NIH funding,
it does not support the animal testing and
other studies needed to move her work to-
ward a clinical trial.
Future clinical work will face “at best sig-
nificant delays, and many projects to iden-
tify new therapies will stop” if the agency
doesn’t continue, says gene therapy re-
searcher Donald Kohn, who heads several
such trials at UCLA.
CIRM’s efforts to raise $200 million in
bridge funding from private sources have
been unsuccessful to date. Now, CIRM boost-
ers are looking to a $5.5 billion bond initiative
that real estate developer Robert Klein, who
led the original push to create the agency,
hopes to add to the November 2020 ballot.
If approved, “We would hope there would
be very little gap” in funding, McCormack
says. But if the voters reject the initiative,
he expects CIRM’s staff to dwindle and the
agency to fold by about 2023. j
108 12 JULY 2019 • VOL 365 ISSUE 6449
ENERGY
Solar plus batteries is now
cheaper than fossil power
Falling prices help utilities start to decarbonize
By Robert F. Service
T
his month, officials in Los Angeles,
California, are expected to approve
a deal that would make solar power
cheaper than ever while also address-
ing its chief flaw: It works only when
the sun shines. The deal calls for a
huge solar farm backed up by one of the
world’s largest batteries. It would provide
7% of the city’s electricity beginning in 2023
at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour
(kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per
kWh for the battery. That’s cheaper than
any power generated with fossil fuel.
“Goodnight #naturalgas, goodnight #coal,
goodnight #nuclear,” Mark Jacobson, an at-
mospheric scientist at Stanford University in
Palo Alto, California, tweeted after news of
the deal surfaced late last month. “Because
of growing economies of scale, prices for re-
newables and batteries keep coming down,”
adds Jacobson, who has advised countries
around the world on how to shift to 100%
renewable electricity. As if on cue, last week
a major U.S. coal company—West Virginia–
based Revelation Energy LLC—filed for
bankruptcy, the second in as many weeks.
The new solar plus storage effort will
be built in Kern County in California by
8minute Solar Energy. The project is ex-
pected to create a 400-megawatt solar array,
generating roughly 876,000 megawatt hours
(MWh) of electricity annually, enough to
power more than 65,000 homes during day-
light hours. Its 800-MWh battery will store
electricity for after the sun sets, reducing
the need for natural gas–fired generators.
Precipitous price declines have already
driven a shift toward renewables backed
by battery storage. In March, an analysis of
Published by AAAS
A large-scale
solar farm
in Southern
California.
Downloaded from http://science.sciencemag.org/ on July 16, 2019
more than 7000 global storage projects by
Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported
that the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion bat-
teries had fallen by 76% since 2012, and by
35% in just the past 18 months, to $187 per
MWh. Another market watch firm, Navigant,
predicts a further halving by 2030, to a price
well below what 8minute has committed to.
Large-scale battery storage generally
relies on lithium-ion batteries—scaled-up
versions of the devices that power laptops
and most electric vehicles. But Jane Long,
an engineer and energy policy expert who
recently retired from Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California, says bat-
teries are only part of the energy storage an-
swer, because they typically provide power
for only a few hours. “You also need to man-
age for long periods of cloudy weather, or
winter conditions,” she says.
Local commitments to switch to 100%
renewables are also propelling the rush
toward grid-scale batteries. By Jacobson’s
count, 54 countries and eight U.S. states
have required a transition to 100% renew-
able electricity. In 2010, California passed
a mandate that the state’s utilities install
electricity storage equivalent to 2% of their
peak electricity demand by 2024.
Although the Los Angeles project may
seem cheap, the costs of a fully renewable–
powered grid would add up. Last month,
the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie
estimated the cost to decarbonize the U.S.
PHOTO: 8MINUTE SOLAR ENERGY
grid alone would be $4.5 trillion, about half
of which would go to installing 900 billion
watts, or 900 gigawatts (GW), of batteries and
other energy storage technologies. (Today,
the world’s battery storage capacity is just
5.5 GW.) But as other cities follow the exam-
ple of Los Angeles, that figure is sure to fall. j
sciencemag.org SCIENCE
Solar plus batteries is now cheaper than fossil power
Robert F. Service

Science 365 (6449), 108.

DOI: 10.1126/science.365.6449.108

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