Energy storage systems have many applications and advantages, and they are being installed at an unprecedented rate around the world. Let's talk about some of the advantages of energy storage systems.
Investments in energy storage systems evolve with the grid, creating long-term benefits and reliability for years to come.
Energy storage is a key hub for the entire grid, adding resources from wind, solar and hydro to nuclear and fossil fuels to demand-side resources and system efficiency assets, and it can act as a generation, transmission or distribution asset as well as a single asset.
Energy storage can save the operating costs of feeding the grid, as well as money for electricity consumers who install energy storage in homes and businesses.
Energy storage can reduce the cost of providing frequency regulation and backup services and save consumers money by storing low-cost energy. By using energy storage during brief outages, businesses can avoid outage losses and continue normal operations.
Energy storage can provide backup power during outages. The same concept that applies to backup power for a single device (for example, a smoke alarm that plugs into a home but also has a battery backup) can be extended to an entire building or even an entire grid.
Energy storage provides flexibility to the grid to ensure uninterrupted power is available to consumers anytime, anywhere. This flexibility is critical for improving both the reliability and resilience of energy storage systems. As the cost of disruption continues to rise, so does the value of enhancing reliability and improving resiliency.
Energy storage can smooth the delivery of variable or intermittent resources like wind and solar by storing excess energy when the wind blows and the sun shines, and delivering it when the opposite happens.
Energy storage can also support efficient powering of inflexible baseload resources. When demand changes rapidly and flexibility is required, energy storage can inject or extract power as needed to precisely match the load.
Simply put, energy storage saves electricity for later use. This creates efficiencies and capacity for the grid, including the ability to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
By introducing more flexibility to the grid, energy storage can help integrate more solar, wind and distributed energy. It could also improve the efficiency of the grid, increase the capacity factor of existing resources, and offset the need to build new polluting peaking power plants.
As our energy supply mix gets cleaner through low-carbon and carbon-free sources, energy storage helps make supply mix easier and more reliable to grow.
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