Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is Quietly Revolutionizing the Energy System

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By Umair Irfan, Wired. 

Excerpt: Making sure there are always enough generators spooled up to send electricity to every single power outlet in the country requires precise coordination. And while the amount of electricity actually used can swing drastically throughout the day and year, the grid is built to meet the brief periods of peak demand, like the hot summer days when air conditioning use can double average electricity consumption. Imagine building a 30-lane highway to make sure no driver ever has to tap their brakes. That’s effectively what those who design and run the grid have had to do. But what if you could just hold onto electricity for a bit and save it for later? You wouldn’t have to overbuild the grid.... You could smooth over the drawbacks of intermittent power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, like wind and solar. ...Back in 2011...a wind farm in West Virginia...was...the world’s largest battery energy storage system...to provide 32 megawatts of power and deliver it for about 15 minutes...eight megawatt-hours total...about the amount of electricity used by 260 homes in a day. ...Last year, the largest storage facility to come online in the US was California’s Edwards & Sanborn Project, which can hold 3.3 gigawatt-hours....to power 110,000 homes for a day. ...What changed? One shift is that the most common battery storage technology, lithium-ion cells, saw huge price drops and energy density increases. ...partly because the cells on the power grid aren’t that different from those in mobile devices and electric vehicles, so grid batteries have benefited from manufacturing improvements that went into those products.... 

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