New York City is in the trenches when it comes to employing innovative energy technologies, which it hopes will help meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 75% by 2050. How so? By installing 100 megawatt/hours of energy storage, which may also allow the city’s consumers to avoid buying dirtier power — something that could save electricity customers there millions each year, a new study says.
Balancing the electricity load is a difficult job. Storage devices, if they can be shown to work at commercial scale, would be a huge boon for utilities that are trying to do everything from advance renewable power to cut electricity use during peak demand. Today, storage adds value to power systems because it can create capacity. And that has the potential to allow utilities to defer investment in expensive infrastructure and carbon-intensive power plants.
Power producers are infatuated with energy storage, realizing that it could be a game-changer. But they are readily acknowledging that technical and financial barriers exist and that overcoming them is paramount if the devices are to reach their potential. An application could be anything from shaving peak load to storing and injecting wind and solar electrons onto the grid.
“As the (New York) state moves forward to meet its clean energy goals of 50 percent renewable energy by 2030 and an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, there are increasing questions about how we can best ensure the reliability of the electricity grid while reducing our reliance on fossil-fuel generation,” New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST) Willam Acker said.
“This study illustrates that replacing these older peaking plants with energy storage presents a cost-effective strategy for reducing harmful air emissions, protecting public health and maintaining grid reliability,” he added. New York City set a goal in September 2016 to install 100 megawatt/hours of energy storage by 2020, along with 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity by 2030.
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