The booming renewables industry in Texas should, in theory, create a role for energy storage plants to manage its variability.
Years into the Lone Star State’s wind and solar deployment, though, little grid storage has arrived, and future prospects look bleak.
Early projects have delivered some 89 megawatts of storage into ERCOT’s grid, said Cheryl Mele, chief operating officer of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator. Another 1,800 megawatts have entered the interconnection queue, which by no means guarantees they will ever be built.
Lack of a winning business model makes it unlikely mass deployments will begin anytime soon. That could leave significant value on the table for Texas ratepayers.
“When you look at the amount of renewables we do have, certainly storage would have some value in being able to respond quickly,” said Mele, speaking at Wood Mackenzie’s Power & Renewables Summit in Austin Wednesday.
“If we start to see a gap between our forecasted load and our forecasted intermittent renewables, the batteries can respond very quickly,” Mele added. “They can cover a bit of that gap while you’re waiting for other resources to ramp up.”
Here are the major obstacles facing the young energy storage market in Texas, with some provisional solutions to get this technology into play.
Utilities can’t own it
Texas power market deregulation separated competitive generation from regulated wires utilities.
That implicates storage because it qualifies as generation in this market; that means it has to compete with gas generators, and wires utilities are not allowed to own it, lest their ownership undermine the bedrock of competitive markets.
That said, batteries don’t actually generate; they store electricity generated elsewhere and release it at useful times. The discharge of power resembles generation, but batteries can readily function as transmission or distribution assets.
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