Instability of the grid drives the need for energy storage and renewables
February 13, 2015
The demands on the nation's power grid are so severe that several energy markets resort to paying consumers to keep their electricity use as low as possible. By cutting energy use during peak hours, customers can earn back the market cost of the electricity they didn't use. This voluntary program, known as demand response, is utilized by several of the country's largest deregulated energy markets and was able to reduce demand in these sectors of the power grid by nearly 29,000 MW in 2013 alone, according to Argus. Unfortunately, this amount is a drop in the bucket of America's energy consumption and merely highlights how far utilities will go to ease some of the pressure placed on the country's electricity infrastructure.
Grid suffers inconsistent reliability
One of the reasons that utilities are eager to make the grid more reliable is because industry insiders know just how precarious the situation is. According to The Huffington Post, a report by The Galvin Electricity Institute, an organization run by former Edison Electric and Motorola executives, called the power grid, "aging, unreliable, inefficient, insecure and incompatible with the needs of a digital economy." A long list of natural phenomenon can wreak havoc on the grid, from heat waves to unexpectedly chilly winters, accounting for much of the infrastructure's insecurity.
Equally troubling are instances where peaking power plants, the costly natural-gas-burning resources that utilities turn to in cases where demand threatens to overload the grid, fail to operate as intended. As recently as 2011, a severe heat in Texas caused major blackouts and knocked out several peaker plants, forcing electricity customers across the state to go without air conditioning in the midst of a brutal summer. Even when peaking power plants are operating properly, they are expensive to operate and consume fuel inefficiently -- an inefficient strategy for dealing with the country's ramping electricity consumption.
Energy storage and renewables offer solutions to stabilize the grid
When it comes to resolving the instability caused by the use of peaking power plants, a mix of renewable energy and energy storage may offer a chance to replace this process with a more sustainable alternative. Solar tends to generate the most energy during the same periods of the peak-demand that induce peak electricity demand, however its power is intermittent with unpredictable patters. Utilities could avoid having to use peaking power plants to get around renewable's intermittency by relying on energy storage, demand response and smart grid tools instead, said GreenTech Media.
Utility scale scenarios aren't the only places where energy storage has the potential to help stabilize the grid. Distributed thermal energy storage applications, for example, can be utilized to help buildings and entire university or commercial campuses manage energy use. By using energy storage to store cheap electricity at night when demand is low, for example, a facility or group of buildings can mitigate the hefty costs of peak power.
