Energy Storage Association ups the ante with aggressive roadmap update

The path to increased electricity storage in the United States has turned into a high-speed highway, prompting the storage industry to scrap its previous optimistic predictions and update them with an even rosier road ahead.

The Energy Storage Association (ESA) this week released a new “roadmap” white paper setting a deployment goal of 100 gigawatts (GW) of storage capacity by 2030, replacing the more modest goal of 35 GW by 2025. It predicted a bullish road ahead with the stars aligned and few potential roadblocks.

“Current market projections indicate remarkable growth for energy storage over the next decade,” said Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of ESA, who called the 100 GW goal “entirely reasonable and attainable.”

The ESA had issued a white paper in 2017 titled “35×25: A Vision for Energy Storage,” but recent advances in technology and support from the government agencies, regulators, and utilities for an increased role for storage in the national energy mix has the industry thinking bigger. The result was a new white paper released in conjunction with the ESA Energy Storage Annual Conference and Expo that took place virtually this week.

“We are all working together to get this right,” Speakes-Backman said Aug. 24 during the video release of the report.

An ongoing surge in the development of renewable energy in recent years along with the growth of electric vehicles (EV), particularly among commercial fleets, has expanded the possibilities for energy storage that will bank power and provide EV charging capabilities at night when solar generation shuts down, and on days when the winds are absent.

The white paper based its 100 GW projection not just on batteries; it also expanded thermal, mechanical and pumped-storage hydropower. Batteries, however, appear to be the most versatile and intriguing technology for electric utilities that are looking for a new element of grid resiliency at the same time they are lowering their fossil-fuel usage and preparing for an anticipated surge in the number of EV cars and trucks on the road.

“We are now entering the adolescent stage (of the storage industry) with the opportunity for real growth down the road,” Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), said during a panel discussion at #ESACon20. “It is really a doable situation. If you are really serious about climate change, you have to deal with the transportation sector.”

Since they manage the overall power grid, Kuhn pointed out, utilities are in a position that allows more options for storage location points along the transmission system as well as how to best fit stored power in with the overall day-to-day flow of electrons. “Storage is one of those things that we are going to find so many different uses for as we go along,” he said, adding that extending the amount of time that power can be stored was particularly intriguing.

“The technology is not standing still,” said Kuhn. “It is going to grow along with the deployments.”
The new white paper used projections from three national consulting firms to conclude that between 85 and 95 GW of storage was now in the development queue for 2030, with utilities involved in virtually all of the projects.

Accelerating that projected growth in order to reach 100 GW will take a combination of financial and regulatory steps, including removing barriers to market participation and tax incentives for stand-alone storage projects.

“We are also going to need precise tools to determine how to dispatch and deploy,” said John D. Hewa, current ESA board chairman and president & CEO of the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. “You have to have an operating plan on how that asset is going to be used and what is the return on investment going to be.”

And while the Trump administration has a reputation for not always being particularly enthusiastic about renewable power, that is not the case when it comes to storing energy from a wide range of sources. Deputy Secretary of Energy Mark Menezes told the conference that the Department of Energy was providing research on best practices and technologies that will help the industry reach the “100×30” goal.

Moreover, Menezes said energy storage had the potential to be a milestone event on par with the invention of the light bulb and nuclear power plants. “Energy storage has the potential to fundamentally change the energy landscape,” he said.