Role of Energy Storage to Support Reliability, Resilience, and Decarbonization of the Power Grid: Current State, Challenges, and Best Practices

States and territories across North America are enacting and enforcing an increasing number of policies to fight climate change, mandating utilities to replace fossil-fueled generation with renewable energy resources (RERs) to achieve grid decarbonization. While RERs will help move toward a decarbonized power system, the inclusion of vast quantities of these resources coupled with an expanding threat landscape poses several reliability and resilience challenges to power system planners due to their variability and intermittency. Energy storage systems (ESS) can alleviate some of these challenges posed by the RERs and threats. However, there still exists significant barriers in modeling, integrating, and deploying ESSs to support reliability, resilience, and grid decarbonization. This panel will discuss the best practices, state-of-the-art approaches, and key challenges to the planning and operations of the grid with ESS, including critical topics such as planning for resilience, reliability, recovery, enhanced resource adequacy, and capacity accreditation techniques.