3 Big Energy Storage Trends, 3 Important Energy Storage Projects
In the maturing energy storage market, less focus on physics, more emphasis on projects, system intelligence and grid integration
The energy storage market is maturing, and there’s now less focus on physics and more emphasis on projects, system intelligence and grid integration. It’s when project development and execution become quotidian and efficient that energy markets really take off.
Here are three beautiful energy storage projects that drive home larger themes in this booming market.
Battery as peaker plant (AES, NextEra, GE)
Epic load shift / solar savior (SolarCity, KIUC)
Aggregating behind-the-meter sites to utility scale (AMS, Tesla)
But first, some market context.
The U.S. deployed 60.3 megawatts of energy storage capacity in the third quarter of this year and 108 megawatts through the first three quarters of the year, according to the latest edition of GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association’s U.S. Energy Storage Monitor.
The report forecasts deployments of 192 megawatts this year, triple last year’s total.
The majority of deployed capacity in the U.S. this past quarter was in the utility-scale (front-of-meter) segment, with 46.6 megawatts deployed.
California added 11 megawatts of behind-the-meter battery systems in the third quarter of 2015 — the lion’s share of the U.S. total of 13.7 megawatts, most of which were in commercial deployments.
