Are We Seeing the Emergence of New Horizons for Energy Storage?

While there didn’t seem to be all that much new equipment on the floor this year, I was impressed by developments in software systems, and even more so in what appeared to me to be a shift in the underlying focus of the show away from deployment costs, to healthy considerations of energy storage benefits.

It seemed that a much clearer and more mature vision of what storage brought to each level of the energy landscape in the way of expanded horizons and opportunities was emerging in real time at the show, which, I think, is the real value of such get-togethers. At the same time, there seemed to be a growing appreciation for the need to replace simplistic cost/performance models with ones that involved full cost accounting for storage deployment in very specific situations. An example of such thinking was the subject of a show floor presentation discussing different strategies for optimizing the lifecycle costs of batteries under varying cycle and depth conditions.

What I found particularly exciting was the increasing recognition that storage produced increased benefits to the deployment of solar for commercial and industrial activities in reducing demand-based charges.

As for the event staging, I think that attendees and exhibitors alike found it first rate. Tom Mitchell, president of Messe Düsseldorf North American, and Janice Lin, founder and CEO of Strategen Consulting LLC and conference chair, are both to be congratulated for their efforts. San Diego and its wonderful Convention Center get my vote for first place among the nation’s host venues; so what’s not to like about ESNA 2016?