Energy storage is an integral component of increasing renewable energy sources and supporting net-zero goals. It serves multiple important roles, including reducing end user demand charges associated with utility services, frequency regulation, and damping energy oscillations.
Lithium batteries dominate the small-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) market due to cost reductions and an established supply chain, but other technologies include pumped storage hydropower – which stores water in reservoirs to generate power on demand – thermal and hydrogen energy storage systems are also viable options.
Renewable Energy
Renewable-energy engineers dread hearing the German term dunkelflaute; it refers to periods when solar panels do little and wind turbines halt rotation, prompting many engineers to use storage systems as an aid in speeding up clean energy transition and helping mitigate climate change’s most harmful impacts.
Grid-scale energy storage comes in various forms: from pumped hydro to giant batteries based on renewable chemical processes or hydrogen tanks underground, depending on their intended use – from general power backup for businesses to specific needs such as the storage of power during natural disasters.
Energy storage can also serve to replace dirty peaker plants that operate only intermittently throughout the year at peak demand and often in marginalized communities, exposing residents to air pollution. Furthermore, energy storage solutions offer silent operation with minimal maintenance requirements while helping consumers reduce electricity prices during peaks – all while cutting fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions!
Community Resilience
Community resilience entails strengthening communities to withstand and adapt to major disruptions resulting from natural disasters or more gradual disruptions caused by economic collapse, climate change, urbanization or pandemics – such as pandemics.
Traditional resilience planning focused on how to react to natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes; however, as climate and other threats accelerate, broader concepts of community resilience have gained more and more prominence.
Energy storage plays a key role in improving community resilience. When coupled with solar, homes and businesses can use stored power during prolonged outages to reduce or eliminate their electricity bills altogether, and reduce carbon emissions thereby becoming more resilient against future environmental challenges.
Increasing Access to Electricity
Energy storage plays an essential role in managing grid power dynamics, helping manage power supply dynamics more effectively and keeping costs under control. While pumped-storage hydropower has long been considered the dominant technology worldwide, environmental and geographic restrictions are driving development of newer solutions like batteries.
At the grid-scale, energy storage can provide services such as dynamic reserve, frequency regulation and balancing, power quality support and even ramping and dispatch control for fossil fuel peaker plants.
At the consumer level, energy storage can help address electricity access challenges by reducing peak time demand, thus lowering prices for consumers. Furthermore, energy storage can supplement solar by increasing hours with renewable energy production and the resale of stored energy can capture revenue streams from wholesale markets – typically 20-50 percent of ESS owners’ total revenue stack from price arbitrage in day-ahead and intraday markets!
Avoiding Peak Pricing
Energy storage can help energy users avoid peak pricing charges, which are levied when demand and prices spike simultaneously. Avoiding peak charges reduces our dependence on fossil-fueled power plants that only operate during these peak times and hence are less environmentally friendly.
Companies on critical peak pricing plans can save money by lowering their usage during these peak periods and cutting their consumption accordingly. One strategy to do this is by installing solar-plus-storage and other energy efficiency measures; another method is through “peak shaving,” in which companies take measures to lower their highest usage during a peak period (e.g. reducing equipment use or changing operations or upgrading insulation).
Energy storage can help maximize renewable energy resources by decreasing their curtailment and improving grid flexibility. With instant dispatchability to serve both as generation and load functions, it ensures grid efficiency is maximized while alleviating transmission infrastructure congestion, preventing reliability violations on wire infrastructures, and strengthening resilience across our energy system.