Grid-level Energy Storage is key to Renewable Energy
Solar power is the fastest growing form of renewable energy. One challenge is that is requires sunlight, which means once the sun sets, you don't generate power. Energy storage (large battery packs) is one solution to capturing excess power during daylight for use during night time. Recently, Design News covered Tesla's Megapack energy storage solution. I think this is a great example of what needs to be done, to be sure, other companies are providing similar solutions, like NEC Energy Storage .
These systems have another benefit, too. They are a fast-acting form of dispatchable power , that along with renewable power, can provide stability to the power grid.
Please share your thoughts on grid-level energy storage. Is it a key component or nice to have?
3 Comments
Time Descending
Energy storage and dispatch definitely is a crucial topic nowadays in the energy and utilities sector. At least in Europe the problem also appears on multiple timescales - on one hand, energy needs to be balanced on the second-scale level to maintain grid stability, on the other hand it needs to be stored for hours or days to account for intermittent solar and wind generation.
There is a lot of academic research going on on the topics of dispatch optimization, optimal placement of generation and storage units and grid stability with intermittent generation, it's a very interesting field!
It's gonna be interesting to see how things pan out - will it be cheaper e.g. to simply install large numbers of big battery substations everywhere, to to use electric cars as grid storage units, to develop centralized power-to-gas stations, a combination of the above (or something else of course).
Sharing another interesting project- Storing electric energy but not in batteries.
Pumped storage hydro-electricity is another way to store the excess the electric energy generated. When supply is more than demand, water is pumped to water reservoir. In turn, when demand is more, generate hydro-electric power from the stored water head. It is known fact, this solution incurs more operating loss and depends on geographical location. So far, Germany owns 6.7 Megawatt installed capacity of pumped storage plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://www.dena.de/en/topics-projects/energy-systems/flexibility-and-storage/pumped-storage/
Storing energy and allowing the storage to be used for grid-stability as well as peak-shifting is absolutly necessary and I think there is a lot of research going on in the field of energy-storage-solutions. It is defenitly necessary to focus more on decentralized solutions and overcome our paradigma of centralized power generation and distribution.
Current advancement in technology enables us to have intelligent grids as well as intelligent energy-generation and -consumption enabling a way for a paradigma shift. I'm realy looking forward to future advancements in this area and I'm glad that companies like Tesla do some great pioneering work.
A real-life example is a pioneer-project in Switzerland: Quartierstrom (in German and English)
