Gas, wind, and solar are it for any new generation in North America for the next five to 10 years (with a few one-offs), speakers at this year’s Platts Global Power Markets conference agreed.
...
The headline of this event report should come as no surprise. Although the event was kicked off by Exelon Generation President & CEO Kenneth Cornew, who sang the praises of his company’s “largest and best-run nuclear fleet,” otherwise only passing mention was made of the new nuclear units under construction in the U.S.
...nuclear was clearly not where other participants saw any business or market action. In the Wednesday project finance session, Donald Kyle, senior managing director of GE Capital Markets Inc., said his company sees a lot of greenfield gas projects ahead. And he was not alone in that view. Another field with enormous growth potential: energy storage. RES Americas Chief Development Officer Rob Morgan claimed, “We’re scratching the surface on storage.” (For a look at the state of energy storage technology and implementation, see “The Year Energy Storage Hit Its Stride” in the forthcoming May issue of POWER at powermag.com.)
As for coal, pending Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations governing GHG emissions for new coal-fired generation mean that no new coal units are likely to pop up unless and until carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) becomes less expensive and more viable in a wider range of geographic locations.

The North American grid is the largest distribution system on earth, yet it’s one with virtually none of its product in reserve. For the most part, electricity needed by customers and the system must be produced at the moment it’s required. At the end of 2013, according to Energy Information Administration (EIA) and Department of Energy (DOE) data, the United States had about 1,200 GW of installed generating capacity and a miniscule 21.1 GW of grid-connected, utility-scale storage (counting projects larger than 1 MW). Measured by electricity generation, the figures are even worse: Total net generation in the U.S. for 2013 was about 4,058 TWh, against roughly 10 TWh of total utility-scale storage.
...
However, 2014 may be remembered as the year that began to change.
What’s driving the shift is a mix of factors from greater policy support, to growing need, to advances in technology. Around the world, a number of significant projects are poised to begin operation this year or in the near future, while several technologies that have been percolating in development for years are finally seeing meaningful grid-scale deployment. (For additional background, see the web supplement to this article, “Energy Storage Technologies Primer.”)
A report in January from IHS predicted that the energy storage market was about to “explode,” adding 6 GW in 2017 and 40 GW by 2022, with about 40% of this growth occurring in the U.S. While total capacities are currently small, events suggest energy storage is building momentum toward becoming a key element of the grid.
Perhaps the single most significant development driving attention to energy storage, according to Matt Roberts, executive director of the Energy Storage Association, has been the increased penetration of intermittent renewable generation. “Adding storage is a way to help with intermittency and peak load aspects,” he told POWER in March. This has meant increased demand for methods to smooth output and respond to sudden drops in production. Not surprisingly, most of the policy activity has been in areas with substantial recent additions to renewable capacity.