On January 7, 2025, Will McNamara was a featured speaker in a Sandia-hosted public webinar, in collaboration with the Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA), entitled “Bridging the Gap: How Emerging State Policies are Making Energy Storage More Affordable and Accessible.” The webinar aimed to summarize a recently published report of the same name (SAND2024-16491O) that Will co-authored with Todd Olinsky-Paul of CESA.

Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) have become essential for enhancing grid stability and supporting clean energy goals. This presentation provided insights into emerging affordability and accessibility approaches in leading state energy storage programs. The report compiles independent research conducted by Sandia and CESA, creating a reference material for state energy storage policymaking across diverse geographical and regulatory jurisdictions.

The webinar attracted 311 attendees, highlighting the importance of making energy storage technology broadly affordable and accessible, particularly for underserved populations in the U.S. The strategies discussed are crucial for enabling the deployment and integration of renewable energy, reducing local health impacts from fossil fuels, and increasing community resilience.

For more information, please refer to the report here.

For further inquiries, please contact Will McNamara.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity (OE), Energy Storage Division.

Sandia National Laboratories is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.

On November 12, 2024, Will McNamara presented at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissions (NARUC) held in Anaheim, CA. The purpose of Will’s presentation was to inform attendees, primarily state regulators and representatives from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), about the newly launched Energy Storage Working Group for Utility Regulators and Staff (RESWG). This collaboration between the Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) and Sandia National Laboratories provides a free, monthly, private online meeting for state electric utility regulators to gather, share information, and learn from experts on specific topics of interest identified by the group.

This working group is important because it offers an exclusive forum for state regulators to collaborate and share information on energy storage-related topics, facilitated by Sandia and CESA. Sandia’s involvement allows for guiding discussions toward critically important topics within the process of enabling energy storage in regulatory frameworks.

The Annual Meeting of NARUC is one of the few meetings held throughout the year where regulatory representatives from every U.S. state are present. Thus, having the opportunity to present at this event is significant, providing a platform to directly engage with state regulators and inform them of the services that Sandia is providing.

For more information, please visit the NARUC Annual Meeting page here.

For further inquiries, please contact Will McNamara.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity (OE), Energy Storage Division.

Sandia National Laboratories is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525

On January 20, 2025, Ujjwol Tamrakar presented a talk titled “An Open-Source Tool for Energy Storage Sizing and Placement in Electric Grids (QuESt-SSIM)” during the session “Energy Storage Applications” at the IEEE Energy Storage Applications and Technologies (EESAT) Conference.

This presentation highlighted an energy storage sizing and placement tool designed for electric grids. As energy storage becomes increasingly integrated into electric grids to facilitate the clean energy transition, ensuring grid resilience and reliability is paramount. The QuESt-SSIM tool provides capabilities to guide decisions on sizing, placement, and control/operating strategies of energy storage systems in electric grids. It can simulate detailed grid models, capture dynamics spanning multiple domains and timescales, and incorporate threats into the decision-making process. This functionality can assist various stakeholders in making informed decisions regarding energy storage deployment and operation in electric grids.

The IEEE EESAT conference is a premier technical forum for presenting advances in energy storage technologies and applications. The work presented directly aligns with the event’s aim of advancing the applications and value of energy storage.

For further inquiries, please contact Ujjwol Tamrakar.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity (OE), Energy Storage Division.

Sandia National Laboratories is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.

On December 1, 2024, the Energy Storage Analytics team at Sandia National Laboratories announced the release of QuESt Planning, an open-source Python-based capacity expansion planning tool focused on energy storage systems. QuESt Planning is a long-term power system capacity expansion planning model that identifies cost-optimal energy storage, generation, and transmission investments while evaluating a broad range of energy storage technologies. This tool is part of QuESt 2.0: Open-source Platform for Energy Storage Analytics.

QuESt Planning leverages a Pyomo-based optimization model to find the cost-optimal mix of generation, transmission, and storage. Users can define energy storage technologies based on power and energy capacity cost, asset lifetime, round-trip efficiency, and other operational characteristics. The tool supports various scenarios and sensitivity analyses to explore different investment portfolios and pathways. It provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) that simplifies the process of input data upload, planning model setup, scenario construction, model execution, and results interpretation. For advanced users, QuESt Planning can also be run through command line scripts and customized to meet specific needs.

Planning for the future power system requires detailed techno-economic modeling and analysis to identify cost-optimal investment portfolios. QuESt Planning offers an optimization-based long-term power system expansion planning framework that allows users to evaluate several scenarios and develop optimal portfolios that include a broad range of energy storage systems. This tool can assist regulators, utilities, states, and independent system operators in evaluating long-term energy storage solutions that are economic and support the evolving grid. Additionally, as an open-source tool, it is available to the research community for further development.

For further inquiries, please contact Cody Newlun.

For more information, please visit the QuESt Planning GitHub page here or the Sandia Energy Storage Analytics page here.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity (OE), Energy Storage Division.

Sandia National Laboratories is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.

On January 21, 2025, Atri Bera and a team of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories announced the development of a Python-based open source software tool called Probabilistic Grid Reliability Analysis with Energy Storage Systems (ProGRESS), which is now available on GitHub. This tool is designed for assessing the resource adequacy of the evolving electric power grid integrated with energy storage systems (ESS) and variable energy resources (VERs).

ProGRESS incorporates state-of-the-art ESS models, capturing the charge-discharge dynamics of ESSs along with their evolving state-of-charge. The tool also includes ESS failure and repair models, allowing users to analyze the availability of their ESS devices when they are needed most. Additionally, ProGRESS can handle the uncertainty associated with VERs, such as wind and solar power generation resources, enabling users to simulate thousands of different renewable generation scenarios based on weather conditions. Users can build their own grid models, download and utilize historical VER data using APIs, and analyze the magnitude, duration, and frequency of expected future outages. ProGRESS empowers users to make informed decisions and plan effectively for VER- and ESS-rich future power systems.

Energy storage systems are being widely deployed for grid reliability and resilience applications to mitigate short- and long-term variability of renewable resources and to serve as backup power for critical infrastructure. Therefore, modeling and integrating ESS operation and failure characteristics into grid reliability and planning frameworks is crucial for understanding their impact on grid reliability and resilience, as well as for planning effectively to achieve and maintain desired grid reliability levels.

For further inquiries, please contact Atri Bera.

For more information, please visit the ProGRESS GitHub page here.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity, Energy Storage Division.

Sandia National Laboratories is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.

On January 21, 2025, Will McNamara moderated a panel discussion on long-duration energy storage (LDES) policies during the first day of the IEEE Energy Storage Applications and Technologies (EESAT) conference, at the request of David Rosewater, Organizing Committee Chair.

The 90-minute session featured a diverse group of panelists, including Alyssa McQuilling, Research & Innovation Manager at the Consortium for Battery Innovation; Roger Miksad, President and Executive Director of Battery Council International; Kieran Claffey, Sr. Research Engineer at Southern Company Services; and Russ Weed, President of CleanTech Strategies. The discussion provided a deep dive into the perspectives on developing and utilizing policies to expand LDES deployment, incorporating insights from battery-focused trade organizations, one of the largest utilities in the U.S., and the financial investment community.

This panel was important because the IEEE EESAT conference primarily focuses on technology, making it crucial to convey that policy reform is often a necessary steppingstone toward bringing new energy storage technologies to the marketplace. The panel generated discussions on the extent to which state policies are essential for advancing energy storage, as exemplified by California, compared to states like Texas, where business dynamics have played a more significant role.

The EESAT conference aims to foster a multi-discipline, systems-oriented, collaborative environment for energy storage researchers and professionals. It encourages sharing ideas and finding collaborative solutions to significant challenges in energy storage. EESAT seeks to address all aspects of electrical energy storage, including technology and its real-world applications to improve grid resilience and create a cleaner, more efficient system.

For further inquiries, please contact Will McNamara.

For more information, please visit the EESAT agenda here.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity (OE), Energy Storage Division.

Sandia National Laboratories is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.