According to a National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) report released in January 2022, significant deployment of energy storage can balance load, meet demand, and help electricity grids run more efficiently.[1] The report, titled Grid Operational Impacts of Widespread Storage Deployment, is the sixth in the Storage Futures Study series, which uses advanced modeling to explore how energy storage will influence the electricity grid. It builds upon a previous report in the series in which the NREL added new capabilities to its Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) model to build least-cost scenarios for a range of cost and performance assumptions. The scenarios from that report showed that storage capacity could exceed 125 GW by the end of 2050, even in the most conservative estimates. This is more than five times the current storage capacity of 24 GW.
The newly released report assessed the hourly operations of high storage power systems with storage capacities ranging from 213 GW to 932 GW. NREL researchers found that by 2050 sufficient storage deployment would allow the grid to operate with no unserved energy and low reserve violations. In addition, the study found that storage is heavily aligned with the availability of solar, which has a predictable cycle that works well with storage. Although energy storage technology has a low annual capacity factor due to its need to charge, researchers found that it has a high utilization—more than 75%--during the top 10 net load hours, when demand is highest. Lastly, the report found that storage’s ability to meet peak demand when solar generation is low can displace generation from thermal sources. Storage could prevent start-ups of those generators and reduce carbon emissions and other air pollutants.