Battery Energy Storage Systems: Past, Present, and Future

Inhalt:
Electric power grid operators have always balanced supply and demand. The need for energy storage to manage grid peaks and valleys has been part of the utilities‘ roadmap for many years. In the 1970s and beyond, pumped hydro storage was deployed on a large scale. While it is cost effective and useful for longer-term storage, it has some downside ecological impact and does not address the shorter time-frames. Battery based Energy Storage Systems (ESS) were proposed as a flexible and modular alternative since the 1980s. Battery ESS (BESS) are scalable, transportable, dense, fast, and efficient. In this paper, BESS technologies‘ past, present, and future will be discussed with focus on Li-Ion based energy storage and its benefits to renewable energies such as PV solar.