Solar’s cheap, now it’s time to integrate

By Peter Fries on 13 July 2012

The lament about solar PV used to be ‘if only it were cheap’. With prices now approaching the magical US $0.50 per watt, that lament has turned to “if only solar electricity could be stored”.

At the 2012 Intersolar North America Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco, that wish is quickly turning into a huge market potential. At a briefing for journalists, the executive director of the California Energy Storage Alliance and managing partner, of Strategen Consulting, Janice Lin, said the two hottest topics today are energy storage and grid integration.

With the implementation of the California legislation passed into law in 2010 – the first in the US – procurement targets for energy storage will be in place by 2015, encouraged by 250 million of state incentives for ‘behind the meter’ projects.

Coupled with nearly $250 billion in utility spending in the next decade in areas where energy storage can compete, Lin believes we are at the start of compelling business case for energy storage in the entire electricity production chain that will “fundamentally change our power system as we know it”.

When storage is “sprinkled” through generation, distribution and demand, she says, the entire system can be optimized and enable more renewable energy as an asset class on its own. Lin cites a bid by AES to the Long Island Power Authority to install 400 MW of storage in a tender for peaking power as an example of where energy storage can be a viable generation asset.

Here’s what Lin sees as the current grd-connected market for energy storage.