New York state has the highest goal for installed energy storage but some of its market structures make it hard for the private sector to pursue those goals.
Richard Glick has a long list of priorities for his chairmanship of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He has already outlined many of them, such as reforming energy market policies that restrict state-supported clean energy resources, expanding transmission capacity and unblocking new grid interconnections, and incorporating climate change impacts into the agency’s decision-making process.
On Thursday, in his first press conference since being elevated to lead FERC last month by President Joe Biden, Glick brought more clarity to some of FERC’s newest initiatives. These include creating a senior-level position to address environmental justice impacts of its decisions, including those involving natural-gas pipeline projects, to ensure they don’t “unfairly impact historically marginalized communities.”
How can U.S. transmission grids and wholesale energy markets adapt to the gigawatts of energy storage coming online over the next decade?
In the near future, the scale of the batteries serving U.S. power grids is set to explode, increasing from about 1.5 gigawatts today to tens or hundreds of gigawatts by 2030. These batteries will play a vital role in shifting intermittent wind and solar power from when it’s produced to when it’s needed and serving broader grid services needs on an increasingly decarbonizing grid.
But as a resource that can both absorb and discharge energy at a moment’s notice, batteries are very different from both dispatchable generators and intermittent wind and solar farms. That requires new technical and economic systems for managing and valuing them — and the grid operators that run wholesale electricity markets serving about two-thirds of the country are struggling to make those changes to keep up with the pace of growth.
Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, has a simple explanation for why U.S. transmission grid policy has stalled the growth of wind and solar power.
“If you talk to a developer, they will say [that] the grid operators and transmission owners are woefully slow and unpredictable in terms of what it costs to connect, and the process is extremely frustrating,” he said in a Monday interview.
“If you talk to the grid operators, they’ll say, 'Renewables developers keep throwing in different projects, [so] I have to study each of them — and when I give them an answer, they drop out of the queue and I have to go back and study everything else.'”