As deployments take hold, real-world challenges abound.
Richard Fioravanti is vice president for distributed energy resources at DNV GL. He assists utilities, manufacturers, and policymakers with business plans, financial models, and device testing for advanced storage technologies, microgrids, and other distributed energy applications.
Advanced energy storage is emerging from laboratories and demonstration projects into actual deployment across the power grid. That is evident not only in pockets of activity throughout the United States, but increasingly throughout the world in deployment commitments (in multiple megawatts) by states, island nations, and countries. At the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) the agency's energy storage database (a voluntary collaborative list of projects) reports 294 advanced energy storage projects totaling 546 MW already operational the U.S., and a total of 611 projects (1.163 GW) operational worldwide. The industry has come a long way in just a few years.