Once commercial, applications for long duration storage on renewable-driven conventional grids include:
- Pairing with wind and solar – for high capacity factor power plants
- Stand-alone storage – to defer investment in new transmission (larger scale) and new distribution (smaller scale) due to changes in power supply and demand locations
- Islanded power grids – to lower power costs and provide back-up power, eliminating high cost diesel and LNG fuels
Distributed generation and new power grid market models at the “grid edge” are evolving and will be enabled by
longer duration storage. Such examples are:
- Green residential/commercial microgrids – these are driven by supplying economic demand reduction to the grid using local renewable generation and the need for resilient back-up power from major grid threats such as weather and terrorism
- Industrial microgrids – similar drivers as above with heating/cooling opportunities using thermal storage systems.
- Datacenters – storage to use 100% contracted renewable power and replace fossil-fueled genset backup power