Assessing Long-duration Energy Storage Deployment Scenarios to Meet California's Energy Goals
E3 identified a realistic and appropriate range of scenarios to evaluate the role of long duration energy storage in meeting the state's energy goals.
Energy & Environmental Economics, Inc.
Recipient
San Francisco, CA
Recipient Location
11th
Senate District
17th
Assembly District
$1,498,638
Amount Spent
Completed
Project Status
Project Result
The project is completed, and its final report is published. The final results include an analysis of the potential role of long-duration energy storage (LDES) in bulk system capacity expansion, Los Angeles basin capacity expansion, and a microgrid case study based on UC San Diego's microgrid. The final scenarios were developed with feedback from CEC staff, TAC members, and public workshops.
View Final ReportThe Issue
California has established goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, both in the electric sector and economywide. Meeting these goals with current technologies would be prohibitively expensive. LDES, with durations of up to 100 hours or more, is an important category of emerging technologies that will help to mitigate electricity shortages that can occur on highly renewable electricity grids. Currently available planning tools cannot properly value or incorporate LDES in long-term energy planning efforts, which hinders its prospects.
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 LDES 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 LDES 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 decarbonized energy goals by developing a clearer understanding of the role that LDES 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 LDES at a local scale, such as to support microgrids.
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 LDES in the electricity sector.
Key Project Members
Amber Mahone
Roderick Go
Subrecipients
The Regents of the University of California, on behalf of the San Diego campus
Form Energy, Inc.
Match Partners
Energy &
Environmental Economics, Inc.
The Regents of the University of California, on behalf of the San Diego campus
Form Energy, Inc.
