The U.S. will triple its energy storage capacity in three years

A new report puts the country´s energy storage capacity at 2.5 GW by 2023

The United States, the world’s largest economy and the second-largest consumer of electricity on the planet, is laying the foundations for a future in which its power grid will be increasingly connected to energy storage sources. Indeed a report by the U.S. Energy Administration (EIA) estimates that the United States will triple its energy storage capacity in just three years.

Although the country’s energy storage capacity is currently around 1 GW, the EIA estimates that it will reach 2.5 GW by 2023. As of March 2019, most of this energy resource is found in the states of California, Illinois, Texas, and West Virginia, as can be seen in the following chart published by the EIA:

Key to capturing the full value of energy resources

This report is reflected in the statements issued by the key agency in this area for the United States, the U.S. Department of Energy, whose Secretary of Energy, Dan Brouillette, announced last January the so-called Energy Storage Grand Challenge, a comprehensive programme aimed at speeding up the development, marketing and deployment of next-generation energy storage technologies, as reported by the portal World Energy Trade.

Brouillette termed energy storage as being “key to capturing the full value of our diverse energy resources”. Indeed, the U.S. executive has set out the need to count on a supply chain for critical materials that is independent of foreign sources by 2030.

Based on this information, the so-called Grand Challenge sets five major objectives to leverage his strategy:

• Developing technology
• Transferring technology
• Policy and assessment
• Manufacturing and supply chain
• Labour force

Electric storage, key to decarbonising the economy

This reality merely highlights the need for an electricity network in which storage systems serve as repositories for the surpluses generated by different technologies that do not experience peaks in generation on demand (such as nuclear power, where production is continuous, or renewable energies, where generation peaks are not related to human planning but rather to meteorological phenomena).