Energy Storage: 2019 Year In Review
The United States Energy Storage industry continued to power forward in 2019, with record deployments, larger state commitments, and continued cost reductions. Systems are larger, durations are longer, and storage continues to make inroads in established portions of the energy system value chain.
The 2019 year in review is bringing to light three of the most impactful changes observed taking place in the industry. There are many significant projects, investments, technologies, regulatory changes, and acquisitions that took place. The criteria by which the three changes highlighted in this report were selected is based principally on scale impact. Energy storage is continuing to insert itself into the energy infrastructure value chain, making inroads, for example, as a real alternative to gas fired peaking plants. Twenty years ago, energy storage was not considered realistic, either for stationary power applications or in transportation applications. Available energy storage systems either were not competitive: in power systems, energy storage was uneconomic, too expensive, and did not meet the high cycle life required. For transportation applications, batteries were too expensive, did not last, took too long to charge, and were too heavy.
Energy storage economics over the intervening twenty years improved significantly, with cost reductions taking place year over year. The primary driver of this change was the continued expansion of manufacturing of batteries for battery electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and the associated investment in innovation in battery technology and performance.
Significant energy storage events of detailed in this 22 page report include:
Deployments of Large Scale Energy Storage Systems;
Increased Commitments by Automobile OEM’s in Battery Manufacturing and Procurements; and
Large Scale Wind-to-Hydrogen