Page - 152 - in Water, Energy, and Environment - A Primer

storage technologies has become critical. Try to imagine life without your mobile telephone or computer. The Energy StorageAssociation, a national trade association for the energy storage industry, describes its importance as follows: ‘Energy storage fundamentally improves the way we generate, deliver, and consume electricity. Energy storage helps during emergencies like power outages from storms, equipment failures, accidents or even terrorist attacks. But the game-changing nature of energy storage is its ability to balance power supply and demand instantaneously – within milliseconds – which makes power networks more resilient, efficient, and cleaner than ever before.’ The Smart Electric Power Alliance is even more concise: ‘The role of energy storage canbe summedup in twowords: grid empowerment.’ Because electric gridsmust balance supply and demand, and because demand is highly variable and hard to control, the balancing is achieved routinely by controlling the output of electricity generators. If these generators are variable, for example, solar and wind, and their grid contributions become significant, achieving the balance ismore difficult, and ameans of compensating for these variations is needed. This is one important role that storageplays. 9.2 TYPESOFSTORAGE Energy storage comes inmany different forms and can provide short or long-term storage. The different forms can be divided into sevenbroad categories (58): • Traditional and Advanced Batteries: a range of electrochemical storage devices, including advanced chemistry batteries and capacitors • FlowBatteries:batterieswhere theenergy isstoreddirectly in the electrolyte solution for longer cycle life andquicker response times Water,Energy, andEnvironment–APrimer152