Energy industry experts speaking at the MEGA Symposium in Baltimore, Maryland, on August 21 agreed that storage is becoming more important to the overall mix of U.S. power sources. They also said utility-scale storage solutions remain “years away,” even as technology advancements in battery systems occur more rapidly.
Panelists at the session entitled “The Transformation of the Power Industry and the Role of Energy Storage,” representing utility, finance, research, and coal industry interests, said storage has proved its mettle when it comes to energy, but there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution when it comes to deploying storage assets across the power grid.
“Energy storage can transform how we make, move, and sell electricity across the grid,” said Steve Baxley, manager for renewables, storage, and distributed generation for Southern Co. “It can transform the whole marketplace. It’s a capacity resource, a flexibility resource, and reliability and resiliency resource, and a voltage and power quality resource. But there are a lot of emerging questions in this field. How do we implement [storage]? How do we interconnect to the grid?”
The experts said storage is valuable to provide backup power and balance intermittent sources of power on the grid, such as solar and wind. They also said it’s not a substitute for baseload power during extreme events such as the “bomb cyclone” that hit much of the eastern U.S. in early 2018, bringing frigid temperatures and icy precipitation.
“During the bomb cyclone, coal provided about 55% of the generation across six [independent systems operators],” said Peter Balash, senior economist for the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). “Without coal, we would have had a [power] shortfall in PJM,” the regional transmission organization (RTO) that serves all or part of 13 midwestern and eastern states. “The second largest [amount of generation] came from fuel oil. Constraints in the pipeline system led to price spikes in natural gas,” and those constraints also meant the supply of gas could not keep up with demand, particularly in the Northeast.
“Increases in power prices during the event offset the lower price of natural gas,” Balash said, noting the extreme weather event showed how generators don’t want to rely on just one energy source to maintain reliability and resilience on the grid. He said that while energy storage facilities often are located near major population centers, “less than 40% of [those] are capable of producing more than 1 MWh of power”—not nearly enough to keep up with the demand for heat during the January event, or the polar vortex event that struck much of the same area in 2014.
Deck Slone, senior vice president of strategy and public policy for Arch Coal, noted the U.S. coal fleet has lost “about 30% of its generation capacity” over the past decade, which he said puts baseload power at risk. “It’s going to take a while to get to large-scale energy storage,” to a level that could begin to replace the lost capacity, he said.
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