What role is large-scale battery storage playing on the grid today?

“Last year was a breakout year for the sector, to prove that on a utility-scale basis, battery storage is a viable, resilient and dependable source of energy,” Thomas Cornell, senior VP Energy Storage Solutions at Mitsubishi Power Americas tells PV Tech Power in a recent interview. 

At the time of writing, around 6,500MW of grid-connected battery storage has been deployed in the most advanced markets in the US, UK and Australia, detailed in the table below. Around two-thirds was deployed last year.
 

But most interviewees agreed that despite these high deployments storage is still mainly being used for its power and not for its energy.  

“Right now storage is mainly being a backup system. There’s hope it will start to do more load shifting of renewables but with the amount out there, it’s limited,” says Haresh Kamath, director of distributed energy resources and energy storage at Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).