The state of Massachusetts is poised to become the third in the U.S. to pass targets for energy storage procurement.
The legislature passed an omnibus energy bill last week, which, if signed by the governor, would instruct the Department of Energy Resources to set a storage target for 2020 if they deem it to be necessary. To date, only California and Oregon have passed storage targets. The California goal of 1.3 gigawatts by 2020 has driven that state to the front of the pack in residential and commercial storage, and a similar mandate would likely make Massachusetts a national storage leader as well.
While many policies might expand deployment of energy storage, this approach is one of the most potent because it mandates utilities install a certain amount of capacity, rather than just incentivising it.
That storage can then help more wind and solar come onto the grid, assist in frequency regulation, defer expensive upgrades to transmission and distribution cables and more.
The legislation gives the Department of Energy resources until the end of the year to decide whether to set a procurement target for “viable and cost-effective” energy storage. If they say yes, they need to adopt the targets by July 2017, and then electric companies will have to comply by the start of 2020. To qualify as energy storage, a system must reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cut demand for peak electrical generation, avoid new investment in generation, transmission or distribution assets, or improve the reliability of the grid. “The biggest thing here is the certainty,” said Matt Roberts, executive director of the Energy Storage Association, the industry group for storage. “People can ramp up operations, people can start to build their businesses because they know this opportunity is going to be there and unfold over the next four or five years.”
If Massachusetts adopts a target similar to California’s in its ratio of storage capacity to peak load, it would be somewhere in the range of 300 to 400 megawatts, Roberts estimated.
