A growing number of U.S. utilities plan to add energy storage to their resource plans this decade, as declining renewable energy costs and investor and public pressure to curb emissions have significantly changed the market over the past few years.
More and more utilities across the United States plan to add more wind and solar capacity and retire coal-fired power plants to start addressing climate change and to take advantage of falling renewable energy procurement costs. And a growing number of those utilities are combining battery energy storage with their new solar and wind capacity plans.
The utilities’ integrated resource plans (IRPs) for the next few years include significant growth in battery energy storage. Battery storage deployments are even expected to exceed the utilities’ expectations in their IRPs, according to a new analysis by Wood Mackenzie.
The energy consultancy’s analysis of the plans of 43 utilities showed “exponential growth in expected utility demand for battery energy storage system procurements, as utilities adopt more aggressive clean energy portfolio strategies,” WoodMac says.
Last year was a crucial year in battery energy storage plans as the utilities with plans to add energy storage increased their combined expected storage deployment five times compared to the 2018 plans, WoodMac’s analysis showed, as carried by Greentech Media.
Currently, utilities in the United States expect 6.3 gigawatts (GW) of battery deployment this decade.
Utilities are starting to move from pilot projects to wider deployment of battery energy storage because they gain experience with the technology, according to Wood Mackenzie’s storage researcher Gregson Curtin.
“Once utilities test energy storage and like it, they keep procuring more and more,” Curtin tells Greentech Media, a unit of Wood Mackenzie.
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