New thrust to pursue long-duration energy storage projects
Published:Monday | October 17, 2022 | 12:08 AMJudana Murphy/Gleaner Writer
ANAHEIM, California:
Professionals in the renewable energy sector have asserted that recent developments in state policies and utility targets for energy storage are creating the market conditions for innovative long-duration energy storage applications, but hurdles are still present.
Long-duration energy storage refers to any system that is able to discharge energy for eight or more hours.
Form Energy’s senior business development manager, Molly Bales, reasoned that in the context of the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which will offer a 10-year tax incentive to investors in solar manufacturing, there will be a massive increase in renewables.
“That largely increases the need for storage and, in addition to that, we are experiencing these extreme weather events that are also leading to additional need for long duration energy storage,” Bales explained during a panel discussion at North America’s largest renewable energy event, RE+, on September 20.
Global head of integrated PV solutions for Lightsource bp, Sara Kayal, argued that current requests for proposals typically limit applicants to lithium ion batteries, which can only store energy for up to eight hours.
But she said that incentives in the IRA which provide support for new storage technologies, in addition to state-level policies, should help open the door to these new ideas.
Kayal added that interconnection delays have become a significant barrier to long-duration energy storage.
Interconnection is a crucial part of enabling timely deployment of solar and other clean-energy projects.
She found support in vice-president of Growth at Fluence Kiran Kumaraswamy, who said it will take some time to get long-duration energy storage projects off the ground.
Kumaraswamy said long-duration storage could capture curtailed energy and even restart the grid during a black start, which is the ability to restart parts of the power system to recover from a blackout.
Meanwhile, director of commercialisation at Malta, Carrie Bellamy, said it is incumbent on renewable energy companies to ensure that they have the technology and employ market strategies to show consumers that it works.
“Depending on the long-duration energy storage technologies that are available, you can add duration to increase the hours of storage capacity,” Bellamy said in response to a question about multi-day storage.