Assessing Long-duration Energy Storage Deployment Scenarios to Meet California's Energy Goals
E3 will identify a realistic and appropriate range of scenarios to evaluate the role of long duration energy storage in meeting the state's energy goals.
Energy and Environmental Economics, Inc. (E3)
Recipient
San Francisco, CA
Recipient Location
11th
Senate District
17th
Assembly District
$727,048
Amount Spent
Active
Project Status
Project Update
This project held a workshop in June 2021 to present its baseline analysis and to collect feedback on its proposed preliminary scenarios for further analysis. The workshop engaged research stakeholders and other members of the public with the project. The project will identify its final scenarios at the next public workshop in March 2022.
The Issue
California has established aggressive goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, both in the electric sector and economywide. Meeting these goals with current technologies would be prohibitively expensive. Long-Duration Energy Storage (LODES), with durations of up to 100 hours or more, is an important suite of emerging technologies that will avoid the infrequent, costly, and large electricity shortages that can occur on highly renewable electricity grids. Currently available planning tools cannot properly value or incorporate LODES in long-term energy planning efforts, which hinders the State's ability to realize a safe, reliable, and resilient future electricity system.
Project Innovation
The E3 team is working with the CEC, technical experts, and the public to identify a realistic and appropriate range of scenarios to evaluate the role of LODES technologies in meeting the state's climate and energy goals. Analysis will evaluate tradeoffs among energy storage duration, performance, and cost against a range of resource supply options and electricity demand conditions. Through this research, the team will fill gaps in current modeling approaches to explicitly assess the role of energy storage of up to 100 hours or more of duration in California's deeply decarbonized future. With a focus on modeling emerging LODES technologies, the toolkit will also capture the operational needs
Project Goals
Project Benefits
The E3 team's proposed project will help overcome barriers to achieving California's climate and energy goals by developing a clearer understanding of the role that LODES can and should play in achieving these goals.
Economic Development
This project will promote economic development by recommending the most cost-effective utility grid infrastructure changes needed to reach state policy goals in 2030 and 2045. Improved electricity resource planning will lower total electricity procurement costs, which in turn will lead to lower electricity rates for customers. Additionally, this study will illustrate use-cases for long duration storage at a local scale, such as to support microgrids and other distribution utility services.
Environmental Sustainability
This project will provide environmental benefits by evaluating various scenarios in which California can replace its existing fossil-based generation fleet with combinations of zero-carbon resources, reducing California's GHG impact. Additionally, the new modeling toolkit will enable planners to more easily capture a range of environmental factors, including but not limited to air quality and land-use impacts.
Reliability
This project will promote greater reliability by developing a new modeling toolkit that can adequately assess and evaluate electric reliability on a zero-carbon grid -- taking into account variable and uncertain renewable electricity generation and electric loads -- to ensure that California's grid can maintain or exceed current levels of reliability while meeting its climate goals.
Energy Security
This project will point the way for California to increase its energy security by illustrating scenarios in which the state can cost-effectively and reliably reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and imported energy sources across the economy through electrification and the support of new technologies like long duration storage in the electricity sector. Additionally, this project will investigate the cost-effectiveness of long duration storage to support resilient local grids, such as those for fire-prone communities.
Key Project Members
Amber Mahone
Roderick Go
Subrecipients
UC San Diego
