Energy Storage Edges for Businesses and Homes

Batteries offer three primary benefits: emergency backup power, financial savings, and increasing the self-supply of solar electricity.

FREMONT, CA: There are three main reasons to purchase a battery: emergency backup power, cost savings, and improving solar self-supply. Apart from these reasons to invest in energy storage for the house or business, many personal and societal benefits are connected with energy storage. Here are a few advantages of energy storage, separated into those for home and business owners and those for the grid & society.

Energy storage edges for households and businesses

The four key advantages of energy storage discussed are resilience, cost savings, renewable integration, and further grid benefits.

Energy storage imparts resilience: Resilience in the energy business is the ability to keep the power on despite bad conditions, such as big storms or other utility disruptions. And that is precise what energy storage delivers: backup power in an emergency.

For example, when energy storage is blended with a solar panel system, the energy organizations can keep the lights on during a grid outage. Today, most homeowners and business owners include energy storage mainly for the resilience benefit.

Energy storage has monetary benefits: Though backup power is the main reason people install energy storage systems today, storage systems can give financial benefits in certain situations. For example, if the energy businesses are on a time-of-use rate or if they have demand charges, storage can bring the most important economic benefits.

In both cases, they can draw power from the battery instead of the grid at times when they would be charged at a higher rate. Also, suppose they do not have access to one-to-one net metering. If so, energy storage can help them increase the financial benefits of solar by enabling them to consume more of the solar they create on-site.

Energy storage eases the integration of renewables: One of the most important advantages of energy storage is that it allows the grid's integration of renewable energy. On this matter, it is a technology enabler for other sustainable energy technologies. However, this is how renewable energy systems' most significant drawback is their variable power generation.

Contrary to the electric grid, designed to handle fossil fuel-fired power plants that may activate to meet demand, renewable energy resources produce when the sun and wind are shining and blowing. Therefore, as more renewable energy plants are constructed, they must better match their output with electricity consumption.

When together with renewable resources, energy storage can make renewable energy "dispatchable" or able to be saved for use when it is required. In other words, energy storage allows wind and solar to run nearly identically to traditional power plants, minus the emissions! This is when energy storage can be beneficial.

Energy storage gives added grid benefits: Energy storage advantages the system in more ways than just allowing the addition of renewable energy. Energy storage can provide the majority, if not all, of the services required to keep our electrical system operational.

Today, a variety of different types of services regulate and support frequency. For example, the electrical grid operates at 60 hertz in the United States. A frequency divergence of more than a few tenths of a hertz (for example, 0.5 hertz) might follow in cascading blackouts. Another technology that can offer frequency support and decrease the requirement for fossil fuel-powered grid resources is energy storage.

And energy storage can play an even bigger role than that: it can offer fast-acting, quick-response injections of electricity onto the grid as an emergency measure, reserves, and even black-start capabilities. All of this indicates that energy storage is a very adaptable and valuable resource that may deliver multiple benefits to the system.