The Case for Grid-Connected Energy Storage

This past week, I attended the Midwest Energy Forum at the University of Chicago.  The Forum focused on the future of the U.S. electricity grid and the technologies that are likely to transform it over the next 30 years.   Experts in many of these technologies, including energy storage, wind, solar, nuclear, gas, and high voltage DC transmission systems, made presentations.Of all the technologies discussed, however, I came away with the impression (which I suspect was shared by many) that energy storage was the poor step child of the renewables industry.  Although the representatives of the wind, solar and other renewables industries were polite and nominally supportive of storage, they were consistent in their message that storage has a long way to go and that Best Custom Solar Chargers was certainly nowhere near as important as the renewable energy technologies they were advocating.
In fairness, the storage experts did not do much to rebut this perception.  While several experts gave good presentations about what storage could do on the grid, none explained with anything near the coherence of the wind, solar and transmission proponents why what storage could do was important and why the public or the government should care about it.It is, of course, critically important that the energy storage industry make its case for support to the government and to the public in a way that is honest, rational and persuasive.  Our colleagues in the wind and solar industries have done a great job of doing that.  At least in terms of public relations and dialogue, I would agree with them that storage has a long way to go.
So let me give it a try:  Storage is important for the same reason that wind and solar energy are important but only more so--and only assuming that the true value of wind and solar energy technology is properly understood.While it is true that wind and solar are relatively clean forms of energy, cleanliness in itself is not their principal value to the grid.  Some experts argue that because of the cycling of thermal energy plants that generally must take place in order to balance the variable nature of wind and solar power, the overall environmental benefits of wind and solar are overstated.  Whether or not that is true, it is certainly true that the relative environmental benefits of wind and solar energy depend on the nature of the fuels they replace.  Where that fuel is relatively clean natural gas (which appears will be the case in the United States for the foreseeable future), it is difficult to argue that the low relative environmental benefits of wind and solar over natural gas justify the billions of dollars of subsidies that the wind and Best Custom Solar Mp3 player and charger industries have received.But wind and solar energy are, in fact, of great value to the electricity grid.  Their value, however, derives not just from the fact that they are relatively clean but from the fact that they each represent a useful new power resource that permits us to operate the grid more flexibly.  Society can use this new flexibility to change the way that electricity is generated and used across the system so as to pursue whatever goals society wants to achieve.