Form Energy Report: Solving the Clean Energy and Climate Justice Puzzle

LINK | How multi-day energy storage can cost-effectively replace long-running peakers in New York State.

The Clean Energy Puzzle (Executive Summary Excerpt)

Over the past several years, 12 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, Washington D.C., and more than 200 other cities and counties, which collectively account for more than a third of U.S. electricity demand, have set goals to achieve 100% carbon-free electricity. A common theme has emerged as these entities have begun exploring how to achieve their goals: existing technologies can enable substantial decarbonization, but firm, zero-carbon power is needed to completely eliminate fossil fuels reliably and cost-effectively. The reliability challenge is most acute in urban areas where it is difficult to expand transmission capacity to import clean energy, and where large populations of disadvantaged communities have faced historically high exposure to pollution from fossil-fueled power plants.

Completing the Clean Energy Puzzle (Conclusion Excerpt)

Now that clean electricity goals are in place in states across the country, policymakers face the challenge of determining how to replace existing fossil-fuel power plants with zero-carbon alternatives. This is especially difficult in geographies where fossil-fueled power plants play an important role in supporting grid reliability. Past studies have shown that today’s commercial energy storage technologies can make meaningful, but limited, progress to support efforts to retire peaker plants. With New York as an example, our analysis shows that emerging long duration storage technologies can be the missing piece to the 100% clean energy puzzle: they have the potential to cost-effectively replace the reliability function that the largest, longest-running reliability peakers fulfill today.

We hope this study will encourage an increasing number of utilities, regulators, and grid operators to consider emerging long duration storage technologies when they model pathways to achieve electricity decarbonization goals.

Read the full report.