Full Title: Distributed Energy Storage: Serving National Interests
Author(s):
Publisher(s): National Alliance for Advanced Technology Batteries
Publication Date: April 1, 2012
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Description (excerpt):
The confluence of four powerful trends underway across the nation’s electric energy system is
driving the need for a drastically different approach to managing our grid system in the twenty first century: (1) the rapid penetration of intermittent renewable resources, including distributed wind and solar photovoltaics (PV), (2) the expected proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs), (3) the recent and continued advances in power electronics such as DC/AC inverters and smart batteries, and (4) a large-scale deployment of a sensing, control, and two-way communication smart grid infrastructure.
Together these trends create both new levels of risk to electric grid reliability, stability, and security as well as a tremendous opportunity—an interconnected system of millions of active endpoints introducing rapid, large, and random fluctuations in power supply and demand and an increased capability to coordinate and optimize these new control points. Grid-connected distributed energy technologies such as distributed generation, smart grids and microgrids, and EVs demand different degrees of freedom to manage and optimize the promise they bring.