The Economics of Battery Energy Storage: How Multi-use, Customer-sited Batters Deliver the Most Services and Value to Customers and the Grid (Executive Summary)

Utilities, Regulators, and private industry have begun exploring how battery-based energy storage can provide value to the U.S. electricity grid at scale. However, exactly where energy storage is deployed on the electricity system can have an immense impact on the value created by the technology. With this report, we explore four key questions: 1. What services can batteries provide to the electricity grid? 2. Where on the grid can batteries deliver each service? 3. How much value can batteries generate when they are highly utilized and multiple services are stacked? 4. What barriers - especially regulatory - currently prevent single energy-storage systems or aggregated fleets of systems from providing multiple, stacked services to the electricity grid, and what are the implications for major stakeholder groups?

 

The Economics of Battery Energy Storage: How Multi-use, Customer-sited Batters Deliver the Most Services and Value to Customers and the Grid

Utilities, Regulators, and private industry have begun exploring how battery-based energy storage can provide value to the U.S. electricity grid at scale. However, exactly where energy storage is deployed on the electricity system can have an immense impact on the value created by the technology. With this report, we explore four key questions: 1. What services can batteries provide to the electricity grid? 2. Where on the grid can batteries deliver each service? 3. How much value can batteries generate when they are highly utilized and multiple services are stacked? 4. What barriers - especially regulatory - currently prevent single energy-storage systems or aggregated fleets of systems from providing multiple, stacked services to the electricity grid, and what are the implications for major stakeholder groups?

 

The Economics of Battery Energy Storage: How Multi-use, Customer-sited Batters Deliver the Most Services and Value to Customers and the Grid (Technical Appendix)

Utilities, Regulators, and private industry have begun exploring how battery-based energy storage can provide value to the U.S. electricity grid at scale. However, exactly where energy storage is deployed on the electricity system can have an immense impact on the value created by the technology. With this report, we explore four key questions: 1. What services can batteries provide to the electricity grid? 2. Where on the grid can batteries deliver each service? 3. How much value can batteries generate when they are highly utilized and multiple services are stacked? 4. What barriers - especially regulatory - currently prevent single energy-storage systems or aggregated fleets of systems from providing multiple, stacked services to the electricity grid, and what are the implications for major stakeholder groups?

 

The Economics of Grid Defection: When and Where Distributed Solar Generation Plus Storage Competes with Traditional Utility Service (4-Pager)

4 Page fact sheet detailing the spiral of falling sales and rising electricity prices that make defection via solar-plus systems even more attractive and undermine utilities' traditional business models

 

Lessons from Australia: Reducing Solar PV Costs Through Installation Labor Efficiency

The development of Australia’s solar market, and the drastic cost reductions it saw over a short period of time, emphasize that high market demand and transparency in costs is a key towards reducing soft costs. When the market is large enough, solar installers and retailers can rely more upon volume for profitability and can create reductions in soft costs in order to compete in the marketplace.

 

The Atlantic Mann Rebuttal

On April 24, 2013, The Atlantic ran a cover feature by writer Charles C. Mann, “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?” The piece contained a number of inaccuracies, to which Rocky Mountain Institute co-founder and chief scientist Amory B. Lovins responded in a rebuttal the magazine posted on May 13, 2013. One day later, Mann offered a counter of his own, but perpetuated a range of errors. In this definitive reply, Lovins sets the record straight.

 

eLab Annual Report 2012-2013

In its first year, eLab made significant strides towards building the capacity of change agents in the electricity sector, fostering the development of new ideas and solutions, and engaging directly with leaders to test and implement new ideas that can ultimately scale broadly throughout the industry.

 

A Review of Solar PV Benefit and Cost Studies

This discussion document reviews 15 DPV benefit/cost studies by utilities, national labs, and other organizations to determine what is known and unknown about the categorization, methodological best practices, and gaps around the benefits and costs of DPV.  It also begins to establish a clear foundation from which additional work on benefit/cost assessments and pricing structure design can be built.

 

Reducing Solar PV Soft Cost: Focus on Installation Labor

Distributed solar energy is a key enabler of the affordable, resilient, secure, and low-carbon electricity future Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) advocates in Reinventing Fire.1 However, in order for distributed solar to play its role, a number of changes must transpire. The most pressing of these changes is for solar costs to come down to U.S. Department of Energy SunShot levels that enable deployment of cost-effective solar systems across the U.S. Between 2008 and 2012, the price of sub-10-kilowatt rooftop systems decreased 37%. However, over 80% of the cost decline is attributable to decreasing solar PV module costs.2 Of the average $4.93/W3 cost of a residential rooftop solar system, over 60% of the total is now attributable to “soft costs,” including those associated with installation labor; permitting, inspection, and interconnection (PII); customer acquisition; financing costs; and installer / integrator margin.4 With module and inverter costs predicted to stabilize at relatively low levels between now and 2020, these soft costs must come down in order for solar energy to be cost competitive across the U.S.

 

Developing Solar Friendly Communities: Permitting, Interconnection, and Net Metering: An Overview of Model Standards and Policy Design Criteria

Over the past several years, procedures and policies surrounding permitting, inspection, interconnection, and net metering of distributed photovoltaic (PV) systems have been the subject of extensive analysis and scrutiny, given their substantial contribution to solar costs. This ongoing period of critical analysis has produced a wide variety of process innovations and model standards capable of streamlining processes for local governments and reducing solar PV costs. As a member of the Colorado-based “Solar Friendly Communities” team under the Rooftop Solar Challenge, Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) has evaluated a number of these standards, innovations, and policy design criteria and developed some specific recommendations. This document surveys a subset of existing permitting, interconnection, and net metering processes and is meant to serve as an initial point of inquiry for interested local governments and communities.

 

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