On March 5-7, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) hosted the U.S.-U.K. Grid-Scale Energy Storage workshop. Organized by Dr. Adam Weber (Berkeley Lab) and Prof. Nigel Brandon (Imperial College, London), and sponsored by the Office of Science and Innovation at the San Francisco British Consulate, the meeting provided a forum to compare and contrast the respective national activities and perspectives on grid-scale energy storage.
Driven from the supply side, the electricity grid will undergo a very deep transformation in the coming years and decades with the emergence of renewable energy, and from the demand side, with the adoption of distributed energy and electric vehicles. Energy storage stands at the intersection and will play a crucial role.
Specific energy storage technologies, as well as case studies, were presented at the workshop. These included thermal energy, compressed air energy storage, and redox flow batteries. In addition, policy and regulatory measures and system integration and the economics of storage were discussed. Participants had the opportunity to review and discuss in detail state of the art advancements in these areas with experts from U.S. National Laboratories, Universities and Industry from both continents.