GAO study highlights usefulness, gains of U.S. energy storage efforts
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted a study to chart how energy storage could enhance grid operations and the factors affecting its deployment, and along the way, determined it could reduce costs and buoy generation, transmission, and distribution efforts alike.
At the heart of the matter is power plants’ need to match output with demand — a factor which varies greatly day by day. The grid itself is changing, adding solar and wind into generation efforts, altering the nature of reliability further.
GAO found that energy storage can be deployed throughout the system in a variety of means to address operational challenges and needs. They can help address disruptions in supply, provide peaking capacity, roll back the need for transmission or distribution system upgrades and act as a source of backup power during outages. They support microgrids and, importantly, reduce costs. Their most significant benefit, however, is that they can store energy in one form and transform it to electric power generation later.
There are barriers to its deployment, though. Industrial readiness, technological support, safety concerns, renewable resource use, cost-competitiveness and existing regulations all factor into industry concerns. That said, GAO found that federal and state policymakers have been working to encourage deployment of energy storage, with notable efforts from the Department of Energy and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission working to reduce market barriers and costs, while state efforts have encouraged deployment by creating targets for storage adoption, revision of planning requirements and generous incentives.
These findings were based on studies published between 2012 and 2017 and interviews with 41 stakeholders.
