Energy storage is indispensable to renewable power’s success. Increasingly, it is also becoming a prominent feature in the appeal of electric vehicles. Storage works at the wholesale and retail levels by facilitating grid stabilization and home energy management. Not surprisingly, the technology is catching on with utilities and consumers.


Released in September, the “U.S. Energy Storage Monitor” confirms this trend, showing a dramatic increase in the deployment of energy storage in the United States. According to the report, which was co-authored by GTM Research, 40.7 megawatts (MW) of energy storage were deployed in the second quarter of this year, a ninefold increase from the same quarter in 2014.


To put this number into perspective, most of that growth is attributed to the interconnection of a 31.5-MW project in Illinois built by the Chicago-based developer Invenergy LLC. The report describes it as the largest project to come online in two years.


As big as it is, the project does not account for all of the storage growth in the United States. At 87 percent of the total, the utility or so-called “front-of-meter” segment represented most of the deployments accounted for in the second quarter. In the “behind the meter” segment, nonresidential storage had its best quarter in history, deploying 4.9 MW. In addition, the residential segment grew by 61 percent, but it still only represents about 1 percent of the total deployments.


Storage projects are being deployed in different regions. According to the report, since the first quarter of last year, 1.3 MW of residential and 10.8 MW of nonresidential storage have been deployed in California. The Golden State is joined by the 13 states and the District of Columbia that make up the territory of the PJM Regional Transmission Organization, where 100 MW of utility-scale storage were deployed during the same time frame.