What’s more exciting than battery storage? If you said “a lot,” you’ve been missing out on the market’s breakneck, if somewhat stealth, expansion over the past few years.
Here are some basics: an energy-storage device stores energy for later use. Obvious enough. It can power electric and hybrid vehicles , as well as billions of smartphones and other electronics. And then there are batteries as big as shipping containers. These guys aren’t holding volts for your emergency flashlight; they power data centers, hospitals, universities, hotels, restaurants, retail stores, and more. And they’ve got a particularly neat trick , which is they store energy when prices are low and release it when they are high. Exciting, indeed. Storage can be deployed both on the grid and at an individual’s home or business. A complex technology, its economics are shaped by a variety of factors: customer type, location, grid needs, regulations, customer load shape, rate structure, and nature of application. Recently, some local utilities have established programs to pay residential energy-storage owners for feeding power from their batteries to the grid during peak demand periods. In return, customers receive compensation, such as a credit on their utility bill. As electric utilities grapple with systemic shifts, especially changes to rate structures, energy storage will also come into play.
The implications are big for the electric-vehicle market, which was slow to take off because charging stations were too few and far between. Now battery storage is changing that . And it’s making waves in the power sector . With prices dropping faster than anyone expected—battery-pack costs were recently $230 per kilowatt-hour, down from $1,000—battery storage is playing a bigger role in energy markets, moving from niche uses like grid balancing to broader ones such as replacing conventional power generators for reliability, providing […]