Status of grid scale energy storage and strategies for accelerating cost effective deployment

Abstract

The development of emerging grid scale energy storage technologies offers great potential to improve the architecture and operation of the electrical grid. This is especially important in the face of increased reliance on clean, dependable electricity and with the influx of renewable generation and smart grid technology. However, at the present, grid scale energy storage is still in an early, developing stage. This document brings together a broad overview of the sector, including rough revenue estimates for each individually possible application for energy storage, a high level overview including rough cost estimates of each technology and supplier, a more focused look at the actual or possible implementations in the market with rough estimates of the systems' economics in each implementation. Following this is a discussion of notable dynamics and potentially effective strategies, based on current industry conditions and existing academic management frameworks. The investigation was accomplished by leveraging prior research in existing literature, and extending it with first hand discussions with industry leaders and market analysis. It was found that the economics of wholesale load shifting are unattractive for any of the emerging energy storage technologies, but that all of the other higher value implementations considered could be reasonably expected to at least break even financially given proper circumstances and the use of an energy storage technology which suits the implementation well. It was found that lithium ion and zinc-bromine flow batteries are well positioned for near term economically beneficial deployment on the grid.

(cont.) Many other technologies exist and are being developed to address these same markets, but are unlikely to be cost effective in the near term. It was also found that government regulation has played and will continue to play a major role in the deployment of energy storage on the grid.