One Expert's View On The Near-Term Future Of Energy Storage
At the same time, energy storage involves complex technologies in a complicated market. We will see a proliferation of use-cases and applications, some of which are still a few years out. And while storage will add a tremendous amount of value and let us add large amounts of renewables, it is not perhaps the Holy Grail. Jaffe cautions that batteries alone are unlikely to let us dispense with fossil fuels entirely.
Batteries won’t replace everything on the grid. They are not going to displace fossil fuel, energy efficiency, or demand response. They will start with a few applications. They are still going to be a ratchet in the toolkit of grid energy, but not the tool box.
That said, storage is a pretty large and important ratchet (or – to mix metaphors – Swiss Army knife) in that toolbox and it will be used in a variety of interesting and useful applications. Still somewhat of a novelty today, storage will become a commonplace and central part of future power grids in the visible future.
Thank you for a very interesting article. Yes, the author makes many excellent points. And right now I am pushing an effort at the manufacturing facility where I work to do a cost analysis on what the bumps on the grid cost us in terms of downtime, loss of components, plc's and drivers, loss of product, and the cost of variable rates. When the costs of the storage gets low enough, that would be a good investment for the company. As the author points out, economics are the determining factor.
