Policy Session on the Future
Anastasia Palivos is an Acting Commissioner of the Illinois Commerce Commission. Emily Brumit and Ritta Merza are legal and policy advisors at the ICC.
On June 27, 2018, Acting Commissioner Anastasia Palivos hosted a policy session on the future of energy storage at the Illinois Commerce Commission in Chicago. This article aims to examine the benefits of and barriers to widespread energy-storage deployment, and the legal and regulatory framework required for this endeavor.
As we work toward a more resilient and reliable electric grid, it becomes increasingly important to understand the value of energy storage and its impact on generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity.
Energy storage is not a new concept. However, in 2017, the International Finance Corporation predicted that energy storage deployments in emerging markets worldwide are expected to grow over forty-percent annually in the next decade. This growth could add close to eighty gigawatts of new storage capacity to the estimated two gigawatts existing today.
The anticipated increase in storage deployment is largely due to the emergence of electric generation from intermittent resources such as wind, solar, and other distributed-energy resources. The influx of DERs, coupled with the desire for a more stable electric grid, has highlighted a need for more efficient ways to store energy.