BOSTON — Energy storage deployment will likely grow to 35 GW by 2025 as consumers, businesses and government agencies increasingly support the technology, industry experts said last week.
“Our industry created the momentum for the unanimous support to unleash the benefits of storage through FERC Order 841,” Energy Storage Association CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman said at her organization’s 28th annual conference. “This is a watershed moment, friends, this is our moment.” (See FERC Rules to Boost Storage Role in Markets.)
The industry’s growth will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, result in $4 billion in cumulative operational savings and avoid 3.6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions and 1,000 metric tons of CO2equivalents, including nitrogen and sulfur oxide, Speakes-Backman said.
“On a regular basis, our teams are in contact with ISOs and RTOs who are seeking guidance in how to create markets and support rules that enable more storage on the transmission level, distribution level, in businesses and in homes,” she said.
Clean Peak Shaving
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker opened the conference April 18 by saying that energy storage’s ability to shave peak demand “may be greater than anything else.”
Baker mentioned the “very unusual winter here in New England and in Massachusetts … where we had subzero temperatures for almost two weeks,” during which the region’s generators burned through nearly 2 million barrels of oil, more than twice the amount used during all of 2016. (See Van Welie: ISO-NE in ‘Race’ to Replace Retirements.)
“If you push storage all the way … you could be in a situation where you store during off-peak so that when you have a period like that, you’ve got enough capacity available to draw the storage and you don’t have to pay those huge prices during peak; you don’t have to use those far dirtier sources of energy,” Baker said.
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