From California’s mandate to utilities to provide 2.25 percent of peak load with energy storage by 2014, to New York’s $2.4 million funding to Ultralife Corp to design, develop, test and install a 1 megawatt-hour lithium-ion storage system, the future of solar – and perhaps renewable energy as a whole – now appears to lie in optimizing smart grid energy loads via storage.
The California mandate, AB 2514, written by Rep. Nancy Skinner (D-Dist.14) and backed by California Attorney General Jerry Brown, would achieve a 5-percent storage rate by 2020, or the equivalent of 3,400 megawatts of energy storage capacity at today’s usage levels.
As the first such piece of legislation introduced across the nation at the state level, it highlights a need for energy storage to make alternative sources like solar energy and wind power an integral part of the grid. In California, where solar energy installations now exceed 106 megawatts, failure to install storage could lead to crashing the grid as a result of on-again, off-again renewable energy sources like solar and wind, according to Megawatt Storage Farms CEO Ed Cazalet.
Unfortunately, the storage initiatives also highlight the fact that energy storage via batteries, especially the lithium-ion versions currently being used in vehicles, is simply too expensive to achieve widespread adoption among publicly-owned utilities driven to produce shareholder returns.
This, notes Pacific Gas & Electric clean tech policy Director Hal LaFlash, could lead utilities to buy storage systems from providers outside the U.S., like Japanese company NKG, depriving the nation of production incentives at the very time an economic slowdown demands them.
It could also lead to abuses where utilities buy relatively unproven and useless storage devices and pass the costs along to customers without improving the peak-demand delivery picture or preventing brownouts.
Fortunately, California has a head start on energy storage thanks to its Self Generation Incentive Program, which offers incentives to distributed energy resources, as well as achieving some notable success among smaller commercial and industrial installers, according to California Energy Storage Alliance Director Janice Lin.
Lin adds that CalISO (the entity managing the state’s energy grid) is actually considering adding energy storage to the list of approved sources for ancillary services; these sources typically get a greater dollar return per kilowatt hour for electricity delivered to meet peak demand.
The energy-storage picture is also helped by DOE’s $165-million in funding for energy storage discoveries, and S. 1091, the Storage Technology of Renewable and Green Energy Act of 2009, which failed in 2009 but may see a resurgence this year.
On the other coast, where solar is getting almost equal play, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA, has offered $2.4 million to Ultralife to install 1 megawatt of energy storage in lithium-ion batteries assisted by ultracapacitors. Ultracapacitors store energy in an electrical field rather than in a chemical medium like traditional batteries.
Ultralife, operating as part of the New York Battery & Energy Storage Consortium, or NY-BEST, plans to start with off-grid distributed energy systems, and works its way up to on-grid applications, which will allow both grid managers and renewable energy generators to maximize energy distribution and storage via advanced computer monitoring and controls.
For the state, the energy storage mediums developed will provide jobs and an economic boost. Eventually, enough developed storage will further encourage more distributed renewable energy in the form of solar or wind.