The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) assessment of reliability and security of the country’s electrical grid network is “encouraging”, the Energy Storage Association’s head has said in her initial reaction to the report’s publication.
Energy secretary Rick Perry ordered his staff in April to produce the report, which was published on Wednesday. Described as a comprehensive analysis and including recommendations to policymakers, regulators and the general public on future policy options, the DOE has now invited the public to offer comments on the “Staff reports on electricity markets and reliability” report via its website.
Our sister site PV Tech reported today that the omission of passages supportive of renewable energy economics – in relation to fluctuating fossil fuel prices – found in a leaked early draft of the document were expunged from the final version. Some PV industry figures also commented to say that the report overstated the challenges in integrating renewables, while others expressed their satisfaction that the study was undertaken in the first place.
Meanwhile, DOE appears to consider energy storage as a vital part of the grid-level toolkit – if there is a desire to integrate increasing levels of variable renewable energy.
“Energy storage will be critical in the future if higher levels of VRE are deployed on the grid and require additional balancing of energy supply and demand in real time,” the report says, in a section on energy storage.
Perhaps ominously, the same section concludes: “However, the need for storage may not be as great for a grid more reliant on traditional baseload generation.”
With President Trump extolling the virtues of so-called “clean coal” in the past few days, some alarm bells might be raised by the ambiguous language.
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