Chapter 7 : Electricity Storage: A New Flexibility Option for Future Power Systems

The present chapter aims at positioning storage technologies with respect to the current market designs and regulatory schemes, thus investigating ways and means to ease a cost effective, market-based deployment and operations, with a special attention paid with operations in Europe. This approach should help avoiding any a priori opinion to favor long term investments in storage systems. Indeed, future electricity systems will face challenges such as significant increases in variability and intermittency of generation, the rapid growth of distributed energy/power resources including distributed generation, the penetration of electric vehicles and controllable demand, deployment of smart appliances enabling active demand response. A growing interplay between transmission and distribution levels will then be given rise. Future power systems will therefore need a properly designed, market-based system architecture allowing for decarbonisation while ensuring system reliability and security of supply. Electricity storage is one amongst several options to provide system services such as capacity firming, back-up capacity, voltage and frequency regulation. Implementing electricity storage solutions thus requires an in-depth understanding of possible services that electricity storage can meet, along with several other grid-, generation-,and demand-side assets.JRC.F.3-Energy securit