Monetizing Energy Storage

Abstract

The energy sector is transforming rapidly as efforts to reduce carbon emissions intensi- fy and renewables become the cheapest source of electricity. Energy storage can provide the required flexibility to balance variable and inflexible low-carbon power generation with demand. Recent years have also seen electric vehicles break through into the mainstream and stationary electricity storage deployment grow at more than 30% each year. In fact, this industry is projected to grow to hundreds of times its current size in the coming decades. We are therefore just at the beginning of a significant overhaul in how energy is produced, stored, and consumed worldwide. In light of this transformation, businesses, policy-makers, and academics need to assess the future cost and value of energy storage. However, this is complicated by the rapidly falling investment cost, the wide range of technologies with different performance characteristics, the wide range of use cases with different performance requirements, and the vastly different market structures around the world. Together, these lead to significant uncertainty regarding the expected commercial viability of energy storage and its potential roles in the future that prevent policy and investment decisions. Our hope is that this book will increase the transparency around the future commercial via- bility and potential roles of energy storage and enable readers to assess these confidently. The online version of this book is free. We did not write it to make money. We wrote it be- cause the transition of the energy system needs to happen rapidly, and energy storage will play a crucial enabling role. We believe that helping as many people as possible to understand the economic case for energy storage is our best route to driving its deploy- ment and helping to accelerate the energy transition. A free digital copy of the book will be available to download from: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/monetizing- energy-storage-9780192888174