Battery storage technology has moved in fits and starts, but today experts note that rapid advances make it difficult for safety standards to keep pace. Developers of storage systems are designing projects to enhance reliability and resiliency, and help integrate renewable resources into the grid, while ensuring rewards outweigh the risks.
Battery storage is considered a complex technology, but its implications for power generation are clear. As storage costs come down, it presents a challenge for utilities behind the meter, with small-scale installations in homes and businesses disrupting rate design and the traditional utility business model.
Larger-scale installations, though, present opportunities for power providers, as storage becomes available for on-grid applications. Utilities are moving to procure storage assets to address long-term regulatory requirements and more short-term needs, such as enhancing reliability or substituting for other generation construction projects.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Argonne National Lab in a 2016 study wrote, “Electrical energy storage could play an important role in decarbonizing the electricity sector by offering a new, carbon-free source of operational flexibility, improving the utilization of generation assets, and facilitating the integration of variable renewable energy sources.” The researchers wrote that storage installations could replace gas-fired peaker plants, immediately supplying power during periods of high demand for electricity. The key was bringing down the cost of batteries while increasing their energy density and lifecycle.
That’s the task for battery manufacturers, as they work to create products that can store more energy, operate longer between charging cycles, and do it with less risk, as technology advancements are moving faster than safety codes can keep up.
“We’re seeing codes desperately trying to catch up with energy storage deployment,” Jim McDowall, senior technical advisor with Saft, a century-old company founded and headquartered in France that develops battery technology (Figure 1), told POWER. “There have been a number of UL standards [established] over the past few years. The aim is always to develop a technology that is reasonably safe and not expensive.”
Waiting on a Legal Framework
Melding safety standards with advancing battery technology brings challenges. Morten Lund, a partner with Stoel Rives in San Diego, California, and part of the firm’s Energy Development group—he is chair of the Energy Storage Initiative and former chair of the Solar Energy Initiative—told POWER, “There still isn’t a good legal framework for battery storage anywhere. We don’t have a legal framework in which to reliably operate. There still isn’t a market anywhere in the world that is big and permanent, not propped up on precarious financial and regulatory stilts.”
Said Lund: “It’s the ongoing battleground between utilities and solar that is creating the market for storage. At the central level, there is some regulatory change, with the 100% RPS [renewable portfolio standards] coming in, that will function as a mandate for storage. Once there’s a true open market for ancillary services at the utility level, then we’ll see real storage in real-time. There’s a paradigm shift to the utility model coming on, but that’s not the same as no utilities.”
Source: powermag
