Energy storage synchronizes electricity supply and demand second by second. It allows utilities to avoid peak pricing spikes, reduce prices during off-peak hours and support low-carbon power, heat, and transport technologies.
Energy storage technology can replace dirty fossil fuel “peaker” plants located in marginalized communities to increase access to cheap electricity but worsen air pollution and climate change impacts. Energy storage also offers the added advantage of expanding capacity and resilience on the grid without creating new wires.
Flexibility
Energy storage allows companies to store electricity so that it can be utilized when there is a power deficit or when prices rise dramatically, making it possible to meet demand while preventing outages in buildings and electric vehicles.
Diverse technologies exist to meet various flexibility needs, ranging from flywheels that leverage inertia to battery-based systems. Larger solutions such as pumped hydro, compressed air and superconducting magnetic energy storage are currently in development.
Energy storage devices can balance energy flows on various timescales, from seconds when there’s an unexpected TV use surge, to months at a time adjusting to changing seasonal demands. They also help reduce “time of use” charges for customers by absorbing electricity during cheaper hours and discharging it at peak times, thus helping the grid operate more efficiently while decreasing pollution-emitting peak power plants’ need. In fact, energy storage could even provide back up power for homes that would otherwise incur expensive demand charges.
Reliability
Energy storage can help mitigate the intermittency of renewable resources by “firming up” their output. Furthermore, it can provide grid services like frequency regulation on shorter timescales (seconds or minutes rather than hours).
Battery storage systems are ideal for these applications due to their quick response times and ability to be scaled quickly up or down, as well as providing power for extended durations (10-100 hours), making them suitable for providing backup power or offsetting seasonal electricity demand.
Other forms of energy storage such as flywheels and super capacitors may also serve as black start resources, providing business continuity during an outage while helping prevent costly disruptions to people’s lives, the economy, or safety. Energy storage also reduces the need for additional transmission and distribution lines – an expensive project which often stands in the way of clean energy deployment.
Community Resilience
Community resilience refers to an umbrella term covering an array of activities and strategies a community can undertake in order to prepare for and respond to disasters, including building social ties and supporting health systems that help individuals to withstand threats and recover quickly from them.
Energy storage can be an invaluable solution to address these needs. By placing storage systems near facilities that serve a community (like hospitals or community centers) as critical infrastructure (for instance EV charging stations in an outage situation), it can serve as backup power sources that keep lights running, refrigerators working, and equipment functioning during power outages.
Modeling community resilience comprehensively requires experts from various fields working together. Models must depict how physical and social infrastructure systems in a community interact to affect recovery efforts after natural disasters; evaluate alternative resilience options; as well as economic methodology that supports decision making. Utilizing accurate network models, utilities could optimize placement and operation of distributed energy storage systems to maximize both reliability and profit by selling aggregated storage capacity into transmission markets.
Economical
Energy storage offers many economic benefits. It can reduce electricity prices during peak times, enable consumers to adjust their energy consumption according to fluctuations in price, and facilitate electrification in various economic sectors such as transportation or heating.
Energy storage also plays a pivotal role in renewables integration by storing surplus wind and solar power when available and dispensing it when required, helping reduce fossil fuel-based power plant demand. Energy storage plays an essential part in renewable integration onto the grid.
Energy storage can help customers avoid demand charges, which are calculated based on the highest electricity usage during each billing period, such as during hot summer days when air conditioning runs continuously or eveningtime when households switch on lights and electronics. Commercial and industrial electricity customers may use on-site energy storage to avoid these fees or opt into utility demand-side management programs to manage demand charges effectively.