One of North America’s most pressing challenges is meeting its ever increasing demand for energy while responding to environmental concerns. It’s no secret that our current power grid infrastructure does not provide a long term solution to meet our needs. Aging infrastructure, increasing pressure due to climate change, and a vulnerable supply chain has lead to government mandates that require renewable energy be implemented into the power grid. Utilizing renewable energy seems like an easy choice, but it does present a challenge. Wind and solar forms of renewable energy do not provide a constant stream of energy; it is intermittent and can be unreliable if it is used as a sole source of power generation, unlike fossil fuels.
Legislation has been put into motion to promote the use of wind and other renewables to make them a more viable option. For example, the province of Ontario, Canada has implemented a Green Energy Act, which requires 25,000 megawatts of renewable-energy capacity to be implemented by 2025. Seventy-five hundred megawatts of coal-powered capacity are to be phased out over the next three years because of emissions or efficiency.
In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds research to increase energy efficiency through renewable energy projects, with a focus on energy storage. Twenty-nine states are requiring a certain percentage of power to be generated by renewable sources through mandated renewable portfolio standards (RPS). Each state that is implementing RPS has its own percentage goal and different timeframes, for example: CA mandates 33% renewables by 2020, NY mandates 30% renewables by 2015, CO mandates 20% renewables by 2020, and MA mandates 22% renewables by 2020.
Unfortunately there is no master plan to implement energy storage across the U.S. or Canada to replace the inherent storage provided to the grid by the retiring fossil fuel generation plant. There has been proposed legislation in the U.S. via the Storage 2012 Act (H.R. 4096). Also the California Public Utility Commission is considering asking that new renewable energy projects require energy storage.
