Some new things in store for electricity

Battery storage grows in non-hydro

The rise of electricity storage: Something for everybody

The barrage of news about the progress and promise of electricity storage in the last year just got another jolt from two disparate sources: the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Tesla Motors.

• On April 21, DOE released the first installment of the Quadrennial Energy Review (QER) focusing on improving the nation’s energy infrastructure and notably referring to “energy transmission, storage, and distribution,” emphasis added.
  The Quadrennial Energy Review (QER) | Department of Energy
• On April 30, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced two new business lines: 
• the PowerWall, a re-chargeable lithium ion battery for homes (in either a 10 kWh or 7 kWh size), and 
• the PowerPack, a 100 kWh battery for grid applications.

These are only two items in a dizzying array of projections, market developments, reports, and statistics emerging in the last year, highlighting that storage is arguably THE big story in the electricity industry. The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently indicated that non-hydro storage capacity in the United States has doubled in the last five years, to 350 MW. A report from Greentech Media and the Electricity Storage Association estimated that the U.S. energy storage market grew 40 percent in 2014 over the previous year, adding 62 MW of storage–and they predict an additional 220 MW will come online in 2015. The growth in the storage market is not limited to the United States: IHS CERA projects that 40 GW of storage will be connected to the grid globally by 2022.