Energy storage may be an emerging technology, but that doesn’t necessarily mean banks and investors are scared of it.

“When you go to the banks, they say, ‘We can get comfortable with the technology,’” John Zahurancik, president of Arlington, Virginia-based AES Energy Storage LLC, said in an interview Tuesday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance summit in New York. “Nobody wants to be at the back of the bus.”

Banks are looking for long-term assurance that the systems will bring in money, especially long-term contracts. “The revenue certainty is the question,” Zahurancik said. “When there’s more to do, you’ll see financing coming.”

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In 1882, Thomas Edison built the Pearl Street Station, the world’s first steam powered electrical distribution plant. In the years that followed, intense competition broke out between he and George Westinghouse, which became known as the War of the Currents, and the technology improved markedly in the coming decades.

As Robert Gordon pointed out in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by 1940 life had been fully transformed. Even middle class homes had most of the modern conveniences we enjoy today, including refrigerators, air conditioners, telephones and radios. Soon, they would have TV’s as well.

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The practice of energy storage—stashing energy away in storage facilities for later use—is still fairly obscure, despite the industry’s recent growth spurt. Last year, the U.S. energy-storage market surged by 243 percent and is expected to become a $2.5 billion industry by 2020, according to the 2015 U.S. Energy Storage Monitor.

Great news for the industry, but how do you get people to notice that impressive feat?

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Every so often an item appears in Blowout Week that’s worthy of further discussion, and Blowout Week 118 has one. It’s the article on ARES – Advanced Rail Energy Storage – a simple combination of three proven technologies – railroads, potential energy release and regenerative braking – which reportedly has a number of advantages over its numerous energy storage competitors:

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The widespread deployment of cost-effective, grid-scale energy storage solutions may still be distant, but the technology appears to be commercially viable. The next step: Getting projects funded and online.

Storing electricity on a large scale has been pursued for years by electric utilities in hopes of using the power to cover periods of peak demand. The ability to store large amounts of power will help power producers fill the production gaps created by growing amounts of intermittent generation such as solar and wind power.

After years of limited progress, several capable systems for storing large amounts of power have emerged from research and development efforts borne from new mandates for energy storage capacity and public demand for cleaner power supplies. Some grid-scale systems are viable now, while others are on the verge of viability.

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It’s a common trope in the U.S. power sector to talk about the day that energy storage “went mainstream,” and was introduced to a broader audience beyond energy and technology circles.

Though batteries have been around for decades, that day was about a year ago — April 30, 2015, to be exact. That was the day Tesla Motors introduced its first two energy storage products, the residential Powerwall and the grid-scale Powerpack.

Coming from a household name like Tesla, whose fashionable electric cars are seen as pacesetters in the automotive industry, the batteries sparked new consumer interest in energy storage, and pre-orders for the product soared.

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The global battery energy storage system market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 37.0% between 2016 and 2022 and is expected to reach USD 6.81 billion by 2022.

The factors driving the battery energy storage system market are the increasing demand for grid-connected solutions, growing electric vehicle market, high requirement of lithium-ion batteries in various applications, and government support are expected to boost the growth of the battery energy storage system market.

The residential and transportation application areas offer a huge growth potential for battery energy storage system. The electric vehicles are expected to gain traction as they are zero-emission vehicles and produce no direct emissions. The BEVs use no other fuel and widespread use of these vehicles could dramatically reduce the petroleum consumption.

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THE INSTALLATION OF a 2-MW battery-based energy storage system at a retired coal plant in New Richmond, Ohio, is being billed as a sign of the growing potential of repurposing shuttered sites for grid-scale energy storage.

In addition to being completed in record time — about four months — the Duke Energy project, which provides frequency regulation services to the Northeastern PJM market, is also seen as a way for Duke to make money on a 60-year-old plant it was ready to mothball.

The system at the old W.C. Beckjord plant is designed to instantaneously absorb excess energy from the grid and release it in seconds, as opposed to a power plant that could take 10 minutes or more to ramp up.

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Batteries can store energy for later, but companies are looking for cheaper alternatives. Three reporters examine technologies that employ air, salt and ice.

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