Tuesday, March 17, 2020

US Storage Industry Achieved Biggest-Ever Quarter and Year in 2019

States such as Hawaii (pictured), Nevada and Arizona are building large-scale solar-plus-battery plants to meet peak electricity demand.

By Julian Spector
The U.S. energy storage industry capped off its biggest year of installations with its largest single quarter in Q4.

U.S. energy storage installation topped 522.7 megawatts/1,113 megawatt-hours in 2019 as a whole and 186.4 megawatts/364.2 megawatt-hours in the fourth quarter, according to the newly released Energy Storage Monitor 2019 Year in Review, produced by Wood Mackenzie and the Energy Storage Association. 

For years, those in the industry have argued that the ability to store and release electricity nearly instantaneously offers great operational benefits, not just for the adoption of intermittent renewables but also for more efficient grid operations.

The latest numbers suggest that this argument is starting to resonate as utilities across the nation contract for large battery plants and an unprecedented number of homeowners seek solar-battery combinations to keep the lights on in an outage.

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