Pennsylvania Energy Storage Assessment

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) Energy Programs Office commissioned Strategen to develop a report to determine the best path forward to increasing energy storage in the Keystone State. The result is the Pennsylvania Energy Storage Assessment: Status, Barriers, and Opportunities.

As of January 2021, there were about 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of energy storage capacity in Pennsylvania. This represents 22 operational or announced energy storage projects, including traditional pumped hydro storage facilities (1.07 GW), lithium-ion batteries (18 megawatts; MW), lead carbon batteries (12.5 MW), ice and chilled water thermal storage (6 MW), and other technologies providing smaller amounts.

The Strategen report recommends pairing grid-scale solar arrays with battery storage to help reduce carbon emissions and increase grid resilience. One way to catalyze this would be for Pennyslvania to set a state energy storage capacity target, as seven other states have done.

For example, to get 10 percent of electricity from solar energy, the DEP Pennsylvania’s Solar Future plan recommends increasing in-state solar energy from about 700 MW today to 11 GW by 2030. If 25 percent of this solar target were paired with a target of 1.5 GW of battery storage, Pennsylvania energy customers could save $273 million annually in wholesale energy costs and avoided public health and environmental impacts from a reduction of 2.5 million metric tons of carbon emissions a year.

The Pennsylvania Energy Storage Assessment recommends 14 other measures to foster energy storage investment and integration, including convening a statewide storage issues forum, designating public funding to accelerate storage deployment, establishing incentive programs for storage projects, and accelerating microgrid deployment at critical facilities.