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Energy Storage System Essay

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The demand for electricity has become a global challenge; especially as the pursuit for sustainable solutions continues to gain support. One emerging technology generating hype in relieving the problem is energy storage systems. While different types of energy storage systems such as gravitational, chemical, mechanical, motion, and heat all offer potential solutions, the development of batteries within the chemical category is still quite new. The Department of Energy has maintained a timeline for grid-scale batteries projects with a total of 9 before 2009 and 124 projects commissioned between 2009 and 2014 (Hart & Sarkissian 3). By 2015, lithium-ion based batteries emerged as the dominant design and thus the technology found its niche in …show more content…

Consequently, this means as the grid adds PV system then more over-generation will occur and as the demand for electricity increases then the more imbalanced the system becomes. Accordingly, BESS can introduce flexibility into grid and mitigate the problem. The objective is to charge up the batteries instead of risking over-generation and curtailment and then enable the operator to discharge the electricity at a more optimal time. Likewise this concept applies to locations with variable weather, wind turbines which experience even less predictable generation, other renewable sources, and alternative energy sources like nuclear. This is significant because BESS will allow for the diversity of energy sources and there is no cost to using diversity as a way to correct intermittency (Timmons et. al 21). However this technology is still rather new, while the hope is to create installations of renewable and storage combinations there are a limited amount of operating cases available to study. Currently, there are a handful of lithium-ion based systems with capacities of 20-40MW in operation in the United States, while the world’s largest

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