California’s goal of reaching 100% emissions-free retail electricity by 2045 is achievable, but will require huge deployments of long-duration energy storage, especially from 2030 onwards.

The US could see new mines and raw material production “scale up” as demand for battery energy storage systems and grid resilience increases over the next decade, according to Margaret O’Riley, battery, automotive and electrification business recruitment lead for Duke Energy Corporation.

While interconnection queues for America’s electric transmission and distribution operators are “swelling up” with growing numbers of energy storage projects, some of the big challenges ahead include enabling fair market participation for both standalone storage and storage paired with generation.

The opening up of independent system operator (ISO) services as a result of FERC 841 has led to a “huge difference” in storage dispatch strategy for merchant markets with concurrent bidding now the typical strategy.

An energy storage project pipeline of 500MW in Texas’s ERCOT market is being developed by Dallas-headquartered distributed energy resources developer and operator Hunt Energy Network.

The drive towards longer duration energy storage will likely be multifaceted, with different technologies finding their place both in front of and behind the meter.

The challenges of explosion prevention – with flammable gases needing to be vented “very rapidly” – in the event of a battery fire have been highlighted at this week’s Energy Storage Summit USA.

The energy storage industry should be well prepared to deal with failure in lithium-ion battery systems so that thermal runaway in a single battery cell never becomes a fire or explosion.

The devastating power crisis in Texas last month proved the value of the energy storage market, particularly distributed models, according to a panel of renewables investors this week.