Maine Governor's Energy Office urges regulators to boost energy storage
Rendering / Courtesy Form Energy
This rendering depicts a 56 megawatt Form Energy system using iron-air technology.
The Maine Governor’s Energy Office submitted a recommendation to the state Public Utilities Commission to procure up to 200 megawatts of cost-effective energy storage for Maine.
The recommendation said the storage would provide grid resilience and lower electricity costs. It would also take advantage of federal incentives and further the state’s clean energy goals.
“Energy storage is an essential tool that will help us build the grid of the future while stabilizing energy costs for Maine households and businesses,” said Dan Burgess, director of the Governor's Energy Office.
“As we continue to diversify Maine’s energy resources to reduce our reliance on expensive, out-of-state fossil fuels, improved energy storage capacity will allow for flexible management of those resources and deliver affordable, reliable, clean energy for Maine people," he added.
Energy storage is considered to be a way to help manage electric load from intermittent sources of energy, such as wind and solar, as well as provide backup power to the grid during peak usage or outages.
The recommendation stems from bipartisan legislation in 2021 that established goals for energy storage in Maine, including 300 megawatts installed by the end of 2025, and 400 MW installed by the end of 2030.
Maine was the ninth U.S. state to adopt energy storage goals into state law.
Goals include advancing the state's climate and clean energy goals and energy storage policy goals.
The bigger picture
Today, a majority of installed energy storage capacity in the U.S. comes from hydroelectric pumped storage with just under 23 gigawatts, primarily built before 2000, operating across the U.S., the report says.
In recent years, lithium-ion batteries have made up more than 90% of new energy storage installations: between 2010 and the end of 2022, nearly 9 GW of battery storage resources have come online.
The U.S. Department of Energy expects continued growth of energy storage resources over the next several decades, including 225 GW to 460 GW of long-duration energy storage resources by 2050 across the country.
Nascent Maine market
Maine’s energy storage market has only more recently begun to grow, with grid-scale deployments of battery energy storage projects first coming online in 2015 and 2016.
The state is not a host of any large hydroelectric pumped storage facilities.
As of January 2023, Maine had 63 megawatts of “front of the meter” battery energy storage projects operating or expected to go into service within the year. Additional storage capacity, also primarily served by batteries, is operating behind-the-meter across the state. The resources are generally smaller in scale and customer-sited.
Additionally, hundreds of megawatts of energy storage resources are at various stages of development in Maine, the report says.
Duration is an issue
To date, more than 90% of energy storage capacity installed in the U.S. since 2010 has a duration of four hours or less, due to several factors that include technological capability, cost, existing regional market rules and the existing set of generators, needs of the electric grid and customer usage, the report says.
“Longer durations of energy storage, in addition to existing shorter duration storage resources, could provide some of the flexibility and firm capacity needs in a future with significant renewable energy penetration, optimizing grid resources across hours, days or weeks at a time,” the report says.
“Duration in the context of energy storage means the number of hours a storage device or facility can deliver continuous energy at its rated capacity,” the report says.
For example, a fully charged battery with 5 megawatts of rated capacity and two-hour duration can deliver 10 megawatts of electricity to the grid.
“To date, there is no standard or universally agreed upon definition of ‘long-duration’ energy storage,” the report noted.
However, the report discussed long-duration storage in terms of resources that:
- Have durations of greater than four hours;
- Can provide inter-day or “diurnal” energy storage (up to approximately 12 hours); or
- Have capacities of multiple days or longer, sometimes referred to as “seasonal” storage.
- 100-hour storage is generally discussed as the upper limit of energy storage resource duration.
Technology options
In 2022, “Maine Energy Storage Market Assessment,” sponsored by the Governor’s Energy office, predicted lithium-ion batteries would likely comprise most of the storage deployed in Maine in the next five years.
But there is a range of other potential long-duration technologies in different categories of technologies or processes, including through mechanical, chemical or thermal processes.
Several promising technologies are in research, development and demonstration phases, the report says.
Mainebiz web partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments