“No other policy in play right now” could be “more immediate or more impactful” than a ‘standalone’ Investment Tax Credit (ITC) in the US for energy storage, the CEO of the national Energy Storage Association has said.
Energy-Storage.news spoke with Kelly Speakes-Backman, head of the ESA, for a wide-ranging feature interview. Speakes-Backman said that energy storage right now is enjoying “extremely strong, bipartisan support, from Congress, from our Department of Energy and other administrations such as the Department of Commerce and Environment Protection Agency (EPA).”
One of the reasons why storage is enjoying cross-party support in what appear to be divided times, is that there is growing recognition of the role batteries and other storage can play in creating an efficient, affordable and sustainable grid, the ESA CEO said. Congress will debate the matter this month.
“Energy storage is there to integrate intermittent resources like solar and wind and help enable our grid to get cleaner – of course – but it’s also there for grid operators to improve the efficiency of the grid, to add more resilience.”
At the moment, energy storage projects are eligible for the solar ITC – itself the subject of strong stakeholder advocacy and lobbying at the moment – but only if installed simultaneously and co-located with the solar power generation.
ESA CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman referred to analysis firm Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables latest quarterly US Energy Storage Monitor report, which highlighted that a storage ITC could boost forecasted installation figures by 2024 by 300MW each year (from 4.8GW to 5.1GW of predicted deployments).
“Frankly, it made sense at the very beginning to have these, the solar-plus-storage [ITC eligible projects]. But storage is applicable to so much more than just being coupled with solar now, that I think it’s important to create a level playing field. The same for solar, the same for CHP, geothermal, fuel cells, all the other technologies that enjoy independent, standalone ITCs, storage is at a point where it’s important that it be counted as a standalone asset,” Kelly Speakes-Backman said.
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