While California and other solar-heavy states are leading on energy storage targets, experts say New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland could quickly close the gap, with political support.
“Legislators in those states are putting everybody on notice that ‘We’re going there,’” said Mike Jacobs, a Cambridge, Mass.-based senior managing analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It might not be as lucrative as you want or as scary as you feared, but we’re going there.”
And they can “go there” because prices on storage systems have dropped as batteries and other technologies have flourished.
However, “without public policy prodding, really significant adoptions of energy storage are going to take a long time because of inherent inertia in the utility world,” Jacobs continued.
Judy Chang, a Massachusetts-based principal with the Brattle Group, agrees. In fact, she said, the Northeast could “out-megawatt” the sunnier west on energy storage if wholesale electricity marketers step up and if states unlock the benefits for customers as well as transmission and distribution providers.
States intent on maximizing energy storage at the local level received a complementary boost from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which recently directed wholesale electricity market operators—Independent System Operators (ISO) and regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs)—to design energy storage rules.
Chang is one of four authors of a report predicting that FERC’s Order 841 is setting the course for 50,000 MW of storage nationwide.
With California forecasting 10,000 MW of storage longer-term, 50,000 MW across the country “is not that far of a reach,” she said.
Jacobs agreed, calling Order 841 an eye-opener at the grid level. “It says you can’t stand idle; you can’t exclude energy storage.
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