Leveraging Existing Battery Storage Technology Affecting Reliability, Emissions, and Energy Economics
Open AccessThe global power system is evolving. Increased dependence on green energy, a critical focus on reliability, smart monitoring and control technology, and a seemingly insatiable demand for power are driving requirements for system resilience. Battery storage supports this need. State and Federal governments, Independent System Operators, and power utilities have been aggressively integrating battery storage systems into the electrical grid agglomeration, yet, the success of these projects varies. The costs and complications are significant, to the point where viability is subject to the whimsical politics of incentivizing tax structures and other, more traditional technical difficulties. Opportunities to incorporate existing battery storage equipment – data centers, laptop computers, mobile phones, electric vehicles – are possible, and these applications have been largely unexplored. This effort shows that through judicious use of these controllable, fast-acting devices, the capacity of available power could be in the thousands of megawatts in the United States alone. This quantity is 1.5 percent of utility grid demand – large enough to significantly improve control, stability, and peak power management of the utility grid. Conveniently, these loads are largely consistent with the grid shape profile, rising and falling with the magnitude of grid power demand. Required investments are small, relative to the effects. Perhaps most importantly, each type of storage device is part of a system that is growing in prevalence; the power drawn by these devices is growing nearly five times as fast as power drawn by the utility grid. The use of traditional utility-scale battery storage systems may prove to be both sustainable and effective, but at present – cost-effective installations are difficult to achieve. Implementing innovative uses of existing storage devices can become a bridge for integration of larger systems into the solution set for power grid resilience. Further, the tremendous growth in capacity per device, number of devices, and types of devices containing battery storage, means that the available power could represent an even larger portion of total grid demand in the future.
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Thompson_gwu_0075A_13034.pdf | 2018-01-16 | Open Access |
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