Exploring benefits and best practices in utility storage at EUCI

The Blymyer Engineers team came away with some great insights from the recent EUCI Best Practices in Utility Storage Solutions conference in Anaheim, California.

We explored the many benefits of energy storage. Not only does energy storage allow utilities to deliver high-quality, reliable services to the distribution and transmission grids, but it also provides new and flexible capacity resources to the system. It enables safe, reliable integration of intermittent distributed and centralized renewable resources. And it provides demand-side solutions for customers.

Ultimately, we learned that energy storage is a highly specialized resource. It can be used for many different purposes — including frequency regulation, voltage control and ancillary services, and peak demand shifting and capacity deferrals — so one size does not fit all utilities.

Given the benefits and complexities of energy storage, we came away from the conference convinced that large-scale storage should come with cost-recovery incentives to encourage adoption.