The Power of Storage - A 21st Century Energy Revolution

An .mp3 of the event is available for download here

Traditional electricity distribution balances load and generation from instant to instant, hand to mouth, much as the food supply of hunter-gatherer tribes. Given the ready availability of fossil fuel this scheme has served society well, with generation being adjusted to follow the variable load. But this has become a dangerous path. We have come to learn that profligate use of fossil fuel brings with it global warming. Reduction of carbon footprint and, therefore, the introduction of renewable generation has become imperative. But renewable wind or solar generation is intermittent and does not follow the diurnal load pattern. Increasing penetration of renewables will place a severe strain on the reliability of the grid. Energy storage provides the buffer, which mediates between variable generation and variable load. It enables deeper penetration of renewables by making them more dispatchable, increases grid reliability, and yields better asset utilization for transmission and distribution. However, energy storage is also a disruptive technology – once it is widely adopted, the electricity business will never be the same.