Where a profitable application of energy storage requires saving of costs or deferral of investments, direct mechanisms, such as subsidies and rebates, will be effective. For applications dependent on price arbitrage, the existence and access to variable market prices are essential.
Investment in energy storage can enable them to meet the contracted amount of electricity more accurately and avoid penalties charged for deviations. Revenue streams are decisive to distinguish business models when one application applies to the same market role multiple times.
Building upon both strands of work, we propose to characterize business models of energy storage as the combination of an application of storage with the revenue stream earned from the operation and the market role of the investor.
Energy storage can be used to lower peak consumption (the highest amount of power a customer draws from the grid), thus reducing the amount customers pay for demand charges. Our model calculates that in North America, the break-even point for most customers paying a demand charge is about $9 per kilowatt.
These technologies convert electrical energy to various forms of storable energy. For mechanical storage, we focus on flywheels, pumped hydro, and compressed air energy storage (CAES). Thermal storage refers to molten salt technology. Chemical storage technologies include supercapacitors, batteries, and hydrogen.
Although electricity storage technologies could provide useful flexibility to modern power systems with substantial shares of power generation from intermittent renewables, investment opportunities and their profitability have remained ambiguous.