DOE Report Provides Guidance On Energy Storage System Evaluations

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
August 21, 2022

A new report from the Department of Energy (DOE) provides guidance on how best to evaluate the potential of energy storage systems based on specific use-cases.

The report, Energy Storage Valuation: A Review of Use Cases and Modeling Tools, draws from publicly available tools developed by the DOE and frames their functions and capabilities in the context of three use-case “families.”

The three use-case families of the DOE’s Energy Storage Grand Challenge are:

• facilitating an evolving grid, which includes using energy storage to ensure the reliability, resilience, and security of the electric power system in the face of the increasing adoption of variable renewable energy and changes in customer demand, as well as stresses from weather, physical, and cyber threats;
• critical services, which includes providing critical services in the defense-industrial, emergency services, government facilities, and health care and public health sectors where an extended loss of power could lead to unacceptable public health and safety risks, especially following disaster-related power outages, and
• facility flexibility, efficiency, and value enhancement at commercial and residential buildings where energy storage is used to leverage opportunities to optimize energy production and usage and enhance the facility value to the owner, operator, and ultimately, the end consumer.

The DOE report provides a methodology for stakeholders to determine which DOE modeling tool is best suited to value an energy storage system for a specific use-case.

“In addition to the need for cost and performance improvements for storage technologies, there is a need for robust valuation methods to enable effective policy, investment, business models, and resource planning,” the report’s authors wrote.

With respect to that goal, the report identified the high-level objectives for the report:

• Provide specific sub-use cases for each use-case family for further characterization;
• Provide technical parameters and relevant data for three example use-cases that could be used in a valuation tool;
• Identify a list of publicly available DOE tools that can provide energy storage valuation insights for ESS use case stakeholders;
• Provide information on the capabilities and different options in each modeling tool;
• Make conclusions on which tools are best suited for valuing certain functional/performance requirements and which tools might be applicable to other use cases;
• Show the methodology that informs a Model Selection Platform (MSP) framework that educates stakeholders on different DOE models and provides a streamlined way to choose the right model that most closely matches their needs.