Only a handful of states – California, Oregon and Massachusetts – have energy storage procurement targets. California and Oregon were the first to enact mandates for energy storage. They were followed by Massachusetts, which recently set an “aspirational” 200 MWh storage target. And in June, the New York legislature passed a bill calling for an energy storage target.
But a new report from the ESA put establishing a procurement target at the top of its list of state policies needed to jump start energy storage deployment. A target creates an environment in which storage purveyors can learn by doing. In states like California, this has already resulted in procurements that have exceeded mandated targets, the report says.
Among the other recommendations from the ESA is the creation of time-varying electricity rates that can demonstrate the value of storage to customers while better aligning customer costs with system costs.
The report argues that the benefits of energy storage must be realized through accurate market signals that enable the value of storage to be monetized. This could include solutions such as locational pricing and crafting rates that signal the best time to leverage storage capabilities, the report says. New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision is one notable efforttackling these issues, including compensating distributed energy resources according to the value assigned by the location.
As prerequisites for competition, ESA recommends that states include energy storage in its integrated resource planning, distribution system planning, grid resilience and emergency management planning, peak demand reduction and energy efficiency programs. The report also recommends cost-benefit analysis for storage, and potential tax incentives to scale deployment in states.
To encourage access, the report recommends that interconnection rules and interconnection queues should be updated to reflect changes in the energy storage market.
Recent Comments