What is Power Storage? Inventing a Resource

• In Event: Infrastructure: Mitigate, Sustain or Vacate?

Abstract

Perhaps no development is more unsettling to the established structure of the electric power industry than the growth of electricity storage. In fact, the impossibility of storage on a large scale was a premise of the way that the 20th century power industry was organized. The growth of storage resources, ongoing and projected, revives questions that were seemingly answered in the early 20th century: What are the products produced and sold by this industry? What is the internal structure of organizations that make up the industry? How are the relations among firms structured and mediated? Based on EIA data, records from regulatory proceedings, and industry reports, this paper examines the ways that a range of actors are actively contesting these questions with regard to the unsettled case of storage in the U.S. power industry. It identifies the stakes in this unresolved process and points to a number of possible resolutions to the question of how power storage is defined as a product, as an investment, and as an object of regulation. For instance, is storage to be treated as generation or as a component of the transmission system? Is merchant storage connected to the transmission system the same resource as distributed storage "behind the meter"? Finally, since the expansion of storage is critical in facilitating the adoption of renewable technologies, the paper considers the implications of these alternative outcomes for the pace and configuration of transition to a sustainable power system.

Author

• Daniel Breslau, Virginia Tech