Among states with established climate change mitigation and carbon reduction goals, one of the first issues addressed is peak energy demand, with New Jersey being no exception to this trend. In this pursuit, the New jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) has developed a straw proposal on energy efficiency and peak demand reduction programs.
In short, the proposal looks to reduce statewide energy costs, give all residents access to energy efficiency upgrades and create jobs through programs administered by the state and the state’s utilities.
Yet with these goals laid out, there’s one glaring omission, one that Luis Davila, a consultant with the Distributed Generation Advocacy Coalition claims could set the state back nationally: there’s no mention of the benefits of storage technologies for peak reduction and efficiency in the entire proposal.
“It’s baffling that Jersey hasn’t taken advantage of [storage], even though others have done the analytical studies and have started to implement the non-energy benefits of battery storage – the efficiency benefits.”
Industry responses
Davila is not alone in this opinion, as during the proposal’s comment period, Sunrun issued twofold recommendations, with one calling on the BPU to establish “bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs that leverage customer sited energy storage assets” as a core peak reduction program offering.
The company went on to outline how Green Mountain Power, Public Service Enterprise Group of Long Island and the state of Massachusetts have all established BYOD programs and how such programs could be used to evaluate New Jersey’s proposed peak demand reduction strategy.
The Energy Storage Association (ESA) also filed comments, focusing on how the state already has an energy storage target of 600 MW by 2021 and 2,000 MW by 2030. With such a goal already laid out and with storage’s proven ability to provide overall system reliability and drive down the peak — the strange exclusion of storage from the straw proposal is magnified.
To solve this issue, ESA offered five recommendations:
- Define energy storage as an eligible resource for system efficiency and peak demand programs
- Establish more prescriptive frameworks for utility peak demand reduction programs
- Lean on existing peak demand reduction programs in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire
- Look to BYOD and Daily/Targeted Dispatch programs as cost-effective solutions
- Non-wires Alternatives pilot design should borrow from New York and Maryland
Fortunately, the initial proposal is just the first step towards the development of a comprehensive energy efficiency and peak demand reduction policy in New Jersey. With such a strong industry show of support for the inclusion of battery storage this early in the process and existing state mandates for storage procurement, there is strong groundwork for inclusion in later revisions.
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“Yet with these goals laid out, there’s one glaring omission, one that Luis Davila, a consultant with the Distributed Generation Advocacy Coalition claims could set the state back nationally: there’s no mention of the benefits of storage technologies for peak reduction and efficiency in the entire proposal.”
It is insane to accept “curtailing” non-fueled energy generation from wind and or solar PV, when energy storage can accept over generation during the “duck curve” and shift the time of day this energy can be used. Since energy storage is generation neutral, it will accept over generation from any resource online. Energy storage can be constructed almost anywhere and scaled to do the most good for a particular area. Energy storage as an asset, can stack grid services that help pay off the asset within 3 to 5 years. This was proven by the TESLA battery installed across the Neoen wind farm in Australia in 2017.
The electric industry is now being “taxed” to see how effective new designs and uses for energy storage and chemistries. How and when to design an energy storage facility around one design over another design. Does a molten battery technology make more overall sense for an application over a lithium ion or other elemental chemistry energy storage topology? Redox flow batteries, would it make sense to have regional redox facilities with several GW of energy storage capability, creating a buss to feed molten battery or lithium ion energy storage systems for fast response grid demands on one site? Creating regional grid (nodes) could make the grid connections in operation now more robust.
Actually, in order to prevent total societal collapse, we need more clean energy generation capacity than that of current fossil fuels capacity. I believe it impossible for anyone not to realize that solar and wind needs an amount of storage approximately equal to the inverse of their capacity factors!
Well, and the next question is whether we provide renewables like wind and solar with renewable storage like pumped hydro or chose non-renewable chemical batteries.
The electric utility industry has to come to the conclusion all by itself, that installing large scale solar PV and or wind generation is not functioning as they choose to “curtail” their non-fueled generation resources and continue to purchase fueled generation to ramp around grid demands. When the practice follows the philosophy of “never” curtail non-fueled generation, but store it and time shift the “product” to when it is needed. Then one doesn’t need natural gas Peaker plants that run maybe 5% of the time in a year, or fueled heat exchange generation systems that are now burning fuel to run 24/7 to allow “spinning demand” or “spinning reserve”.
When the electric utilities finally realize, even at today’s prices, energy storage is a generation neutral entity, the battery with electronic switching technology can now switch on to address grid demands in milliseconds to seconds and some design work has created the grid forming inverter that can act like a mechanical generation resource on the grid to help keep the grid out of oscillation and impendence matched to the loads online at any time. The utility scale ESS can also stack grid services, frequency, voltage regulation, arbitrage, grid forming, time shifting stored energy, into one asset and also generate not only (electricity) but revenues from these stacked grid services. Build the energy storage large enough and one can use intermittent non-fueled generation as a dispatchable generation resource.