Opportunities for energy storage in stressed electricity supply systems

Summary form only given. As electric utilities continue to restructure, there is an increasing emphasis on increased asset utilization, making it more difficult to justify the investments necessary to bring demand and supply back into balance. Additionally, the process of building transmission and conventional generation is becoming more costly and more time-consuming as the result of more restrictive environmental constraints and because of "not in my backyard" protests based on both environmental and aesthetic considerations. At the simplest level, energy storage can be used to balance fluctuations in the supply and demand of electricity. It is distributed energy storage technologies, with next-generation storage devices, that appear most likely to fill the role for energy storage in solving the current problems of stressed electricity supply systems. Distributed energy storage is particularly suited to providing such solutions. Distributed storage technologies include batteries, flywheels, SMES, supercapacitors and micro-CAES.