Applications

See the menu at left for discussions of individual storage applications.

Applications Overview

Enhanced Power Quality

Energy storage can provide “ride-through” for momentary outages, and extended protection from longer outages. Coupled with advanced power electronics, storage systems can reduce harmonic distortions, and eliminate voltage sags and surges.

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Renewables Support

In combination with renewable resources, energy storage can increase the value of photovoltaic (PV) and wind-generated electricity, making supply coincident with periods of peak consumer demand.

Utility Support

Energy storage systems can be used to follow load, stabilize voltage & frequency, manage peak loads, improve power quality, defer upgrade investments, and support renewables. The side chart shows the power and discharge time requirements for a variety of storage applications in the utility industry.

The world market for batteries is estimated at about US $15 billion each year. The ESA estimates that industrial batteries, as might be used in uninterruptable power supplies, power quality applications, standby and reserve batteries amount to US $5 billion each year.

Manufacturing facilities for advanced batteries specifically designed for energy storage applications on power systems are being installed in North America, Europe and Asia. New manufacturing capability of at least 300 MW per year has been brought on stream in the past twelve to eighteen months.

There is a revival of interest world-wide in energy storage and its applications. It is not just about batteries. Other techniques such as advanced flywheels and superconductivity are also attracting great interest.

 

Electricity storage provides several benefits for electric power utilities, transmission companies, electricity generators, and electric power end users.  These benefits include: reduced financial losses due to poor power quality and power outages, energy price arbitrage involving charging with low priced “off-peak” energy for use later when energy cost and price is high, and a variety of services that can be described, but which may or may not provide revenue at present.  An economist might say that though the benefits exist, they are not internalized, meaning that today no mechanism whereby the supplier can accrue revenue from the benefit.  Simply put, the electricity market is not economically efficient because of the way the services are priced.

Over the past decade or so, which has seen several attempts at reregulation, the value of the benefits that electricity storage can provide have been expanded and quantified.  Some have been evaluated, isolated, and even demonstrated.  The latter include, for example, the class of benefits called “distributed” benefits (those which accrue because of the location of the storage capacity), and benefits associated with superior performance of the transmission system.

Here we follow a summary of benefits initially explored by Joe Iannucci and Jim Eyer of Distributed Utility Associates.  They developed this approach for the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).  As a result, though the examples in this section have wide validity, the descriptions and quantities, particularly the market estimates given later are California-centric mainly relevant to the situation in California. 

Generally, more than one benefit is required for the total value of a storage installation to exceed its costs.  However, one cannot just look at the sum of all possible benefits because there may be some interference between the functionality and value of different aspects.  A thorough (qualitative and quantitative) consideration of the technology and the market are required before benefits may be combined appropriately.  Because the purpose of this section is to provide the analyst with a set of tools rather than supply answers, we simply list and describe the possible benefits.  At some later time, it may be possible to add quantitative information on the magnitude of the potential market. 

Updated April 2009