Energy Storage & Transmission: Critical Components of an Electrified Economy

By Robert Tremblay

Policy Manager, Energy Storage Canada

The grid of the future needs to be flexible.  

In recent years technological progress and ambitious climate policy have augmented improvements to both cost and performance of clean technologies like wind, solar, electric vehicles, and heat pumps.  

While these improvements promise an increased quality of life and simultaneous reduction of our collective carbon footprint, they are also poised to create an electricity system with more significant fluctuations in supply and demand. Therefore, we won’t realize the potential benefits without considerably more flexibility and resiliency in our grid to offset the bigger swings in supply and demand. 

As we achieve increased renewable integration and electrification, we will need grids able to balance stretches of low electricity supply paired with heightened demand.  

An example of the above dynamic is the dunkelflaute, a German word meaning “dark doldrums,” which refers to a time of low wind, low solar, cold temperatures, and high load. To take full advantage of the benefits electrification promises, we will need grids able to deal with situations like a dunkelflaute.  

In fact, the recently announced Canada Electricity Advisory Council is tasked with understanding how to increase reliability, and therefore flexibility, as Canada decarbonizes and expands its electricity system. Two technologies expected to be critical in meeting this challenge are interregional transmission and energy storage. 

Interregional transmission moves energy across space. Making stronger connections between grids separated by larger distances allows everyone to access a wider array of electricity resources.  

We can see examples of this in the pairing of the Pacific Northwest, California, and Manitoba with significant solar and hydropower assets, and wind heavy midwestern states like Iowa.  

The benefits of transmission between regions can be even more nuanced, enabling dynamics such as energy moving across time zones, and allowing strategies such as moving solar from the afternoon in one region to where it is evening in another.  

However, regional transmission requires significant regional cooperation and coordination, large-scale investment, and navigating the difficult permitting path for linear infrastructure to realize these benefits.  

Alternatively, energy storage moves energy across time, taking energy in now and saving it for later. Rather than moving energy to consumers in distinct locations, energy storage allows energy to be moved to customers in the future.  

There are already significant amounts of energy storage installed in the form of pumped hydro and batteries in regions like Australia, California, the European Alps, and the American Appalachians. In future we will see storage deployed through an even broader suite of technologies, such as compressed air, thermal storage, and non-lithium battery chemistries, among others. 

The ability of energy storage technologies to move energy from times of plentiful supply to times of limited supply, will be more critical than ever as the number of intermittent assets and increased electrification of the grid changes the patterns of energy availability and usage. 

The reality of electrification is that both interregional transmission and energy storage are going to be critical elements of the decarbonization and electrification of Canada’s grid.

Both technologies provide flexibility to electricity systems, which can sometimes see them characterized as competitors, particularly with terms like “non-wires alternative,” which is often used to describe energy storage.

However, the two options are more complementary than exclusionary.

Energy storage is a developing market and is just getting started in Canada. As an incumbent technology, transmission could be deployed at the scale needed, but it would become slow and increasingly cumbersome on its own.

In contrast, when deployed together these two options can complement each other and meet the needs of the system more efficiently.

Storage, particularly in the form of battery energy storage systems (BESS), can be flexible in terms of their location, scalable, and relatively quick to build, enabling immediate flexibility for clean generation load to be added. Transmission, if developed in tandem, can do so at a more moderate pace, providing the larger scale needed in the future without preventing the critical short-term needs for system flexibility to be met.

Ultimately, both interregional transmission and energy storage will be critical components of a decarbonized and electrified economy because the system will need more flexibility.

Rather than envisioning these technologies in a zero-sum battle with a single winner, we should view them as complementary pieces of the future energy system, enabling each to play to their strengths. We are going to need all the capacity both storage and transmission can provide to electrify Canada’s grid – both wires and non-wires solutions.