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Energy storage has steadily expanded over the last twelve years. This growth may be mostly because of how much battery prices have dropped in the period, which is as much as a 75% decline. Individual homeowners and some business owners, because of how much more affordable batteries are now, may also have become much more interested than they were just a dozen years ago.
It might sound sort of unusual, but Puget Sound Energy is paying customers to get their own batteries. When there are enough individually-owned batteries within a certain area they can be used as a virtual power plant to support local utilities and grids. That is, they operate as a huge, distributed energy storage system and to the extent sometimes it may not be necessary to build a new natural gas peaker plant to use for backup…