Benefits for a Flexible Clean Energy Grid
One reason that the deployment of energy storage is accelerating is that it increases flexibility in grid operations, offers multiple services, and can be used in different applications. Storage systems can also be located in multiple segments of the electricity grid—in the transmission network, the distribution network (where electricity is delivered to consumers), the generator (for example, co-located with wind or solar), and in the case of smaller scale systems, at the commercial building or residential level.
Because some renewable energy technologies–such as wind and solar–have variable outputs, storage technologies have great potential for smoothing out the electricity supply from these sources and ensuring that the supply of generation matches the demand. If charged during periods of excess renewable generation and discharged at times of increased demand, energy storage can help maximize the use of renewable energy and ensure that less is wasted. And residential battery storage can help the utility to balance electricity customer demand with power supply to better align the more variable wind and solar supply with electricity demand.
More broadly, storage can provide electricity in response to changes or drops in electricity, provide electricity frequency and voltage regulation, and defer or avoid the need for costly investments in transmission and distribution to reduce congestion. Energy storage is also valued for its rapid response–battery storage can begin discharging power to the grid very quickly, within a fraction of a second, while conventional thermal power plants take hours to restart. This rapid response is important for ensuring the stability of the grid when unexpected increases in demand occur.
Energy storage also becomes more important the farther you are from the electrical grid. Homes in rural communities that are farther away from the transmission grid are more vulnerable to disruption than homes in large metropolitan areas. Islands and microgrids have smaller service areas that are (or can be) disconnected from the larger electrical grid. Because they may not be able to rely on the larger grid, these communities can use energy storage to avoid blackouts.
Benefits to Communities
Deployment of energy storage can increase access to and deliver benefits for low-income communities and communities historically overburdened with the impacts of pollution and climate change.
A key benefit of energy storage is its ability to provide the grid services currently fulfilled by fossil fuel peaker plants—or “peakers”— that only operate during limited times throughout the year at periods of extremely high demand for electricity, such as during a heat wave. Peaker plants are usually sited in areas of high electricity demand like urban centers—often in or near low-income communities or communities of color. Most peakers are powered by natural gas (although a few even run on coal, oil, and diesel fuel), increasing air pollution and exacerbating already poor public health impacts in these overburdened communities. Energy storage can replace existing dirty peaker plants, and it can eliminate the need to develop others in the future. Battery storage is already cheaper than gas turbines that provide this service, meaning the replacement of existing peakers will accelerate in the coming years.
Related to this, storage can help customers avoid peak pricing (price spikes) by smoothing out demand. Similar to how car rideshare services spike in prices on holidays or other times of high demand, in some places electricity gets more expensive when demand is high, such as during heat waves as more people rely on air conditioning. Energy storage can reduce high demand, and those cost savings could be passed on to customers.
Community resiliency is essential in both rural and urban settings. Energy storage can help meet peak energy demands in densely populated cities, reducing strain on the grid and minimizing spikes in electricity costs. Energy storage can help prevent outages during extreme heat or cold, helping keep people safe. Storage can be used alone or in addition to community solar or aggregated home or commercial building rooftop solar projects to create community-level microgrids or resiliency hubs. By providing localized backup power, these systems can help communities during natural disasters—for example, in meeting energy demands during floods, wildfires, and extreme weather events, all of which are becoming more frequent and intense with climate change.
By charging storage facilities with energy generated from renewable sources, we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, decrease our dependence on dirty fossil fuel plants contributing to pollution and negative health outcomes in communities, and even increase community resilience with solar plus storage systems.
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