New York City, pictured in a state of storm-induced partial blackout. Image: Flickr user: Dan Nguyen.
Efforts to modernise New York’s grid would be best served by adding 2GW of multi-hour energy storage by 2025 and 4GW by 2030, and enable the achievement of renewable energy targets, according to advocacy body NY BEST.
NY BEST, the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium, has just launched its second roadmap for energy storage in the East Coast US state, the first having been published in 2012. The state has in place goals to reduce emissions by 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050, as well as generating 50% of its electricity from renewables by the earlier of those years.
To support this aim and also to modernise the grid for efficiency and resiliency, the state launched New York REV (Reforming the Energy Vision) in mid-2014, with Governor Andrew Cuomo promising a “fundamental transformation” of the network.
NY BEST, described as part development advisory, part trade advocacy group, with 150 member companies, was among the stakeholders invited to provide input into the design of the REV programme. With its latest roadmap, the group has reiterated the ability of energy storage to help integrate renewables, to give the grid better resilience in an urban environment frequently hit by extreme weather conditions, while also improving the efficiency and capacity factor or utilisation of the grid.
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For instance, in an interview in PV Tech Power Volume 4, NY BEST resources director John Cerveny said that the New York Public Service Commission found the top 100 [peak] hours in New York were cost the state around US$1.2 to US$1.7 billion a year.
It was important to look at the ratio of peak power to average power Cerveny said, particularly from an energy storage perspective.
“…they’ve been very heavily targeting how we flatten the top peaks here, and that’s part of this process.”
Of the overarching NY REV programme, Cerveny and NY BEST executive director William Acker said it could be a “valuable lesson” for the rest of the world in how to adopt energy storage effectively to increase flexibility and resilience of networks.
Roadmap’s recommendations
NY BEST’s roadmap recommends that market mechanisms that recognise the true value of storage in monetary terms and the creation of common financing vehicles are essential specific actions that the state needs to take to achieve these diverse, but related, aims.
This would start next year with the establishment of standardised safety regulations, with 2018 to see regulations around New York’s Independent System Operator (NYISO), overseeing transmission and dispatch of 500 generators as well as the state’s bulk power markets, modified to allow energy storage to participate in wholesale markets. By the end of 2019, electricity pricing should recognise the locational value of distributed energy resources (DERs), made possible by “collecting circuit-by-circuit distribution data” across the network. If ongoing efforts to reduce soft costs result in a 33% drop by 2020, as NY BEST’s roadmap recommends, the state would be in a position to each 1GW of installed storage capacity by 2022, 2GW by 2025 and so on, to hit 4GW by 2030.
The roadmap looks at a number of specific case studies from companies including Con Edison, Stem and AES Energy Storage and was developed through a series of workshop sessions with NY BEST’s member companies and other stakeholders.
NY BEST’s 2016 Energy Storage Roadmap can be viewed online here.
