Ancillary services, including frequency response and the provision of spinning reserves, continue to make up a significant portion of battery applications, EIA said. But the list of use cases has been growing along with the nation’s battery capacity.
“Accompanying this sharp increase in capacity, how battery storage capacity technologies are deployed has also significantly shifted,” EIA said.
Arbitrage was cited as a use case for more than half of batteries installed last year, representing 2.7 GW of capacity, and in the California Independent System Operator service territory the figure was more than 80%. In those instances, storage operators charge batteries when prices are low and discharge them as demand on the grid rises.
