October 31, 2019
Bulking Up: Storage Heads for Center Stage
Until recently, battery energy storage has largely served markets at the margin, offering short bursts of frequency regulation or light pricing arbitrage. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), however, utility-scale storage is about to leap forward in the U.S. The growth is being driven not just by falling storage costs, but also continuous price drops for clean generation. Forecasters largely missed this emerging dynamic. Although storage’s progress down the cost curve has historically been slower, whole system costs have continued to fall as wind and solar became the cheapest form of generation.
