The DOE/EPRI 2013 Electricity Storage Handbook in Collaboration with NRECA (PDF, 12 mb) has been released and is available for download. It was jointly authored by the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories, Electric Power Research Institute, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, and AECOM Technical Services, Inc.

The Electricity Storage Handbook is a how-to guide for utility and rural cooperative engineers, planners, and decision makers to plan and implement energy storage projects. The Handbook also serves as an information resource for investors and venture capitalists, providing the latest developments in technologies and tools to guide their evaluations of energy storage opportunities. It includes a comprehensive database of the cost of current storage systems in a wide variety of electric utility and customer services, along with interconnection schematics. A list of significant past and present energy storage projects is provided for a practical perspective.

Sandia National Laboratories’ Electric Power Systems Research Dept. and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Advanced Power and Energy Systems Group have released a jointly authored report that examines how grid-level electricity storage might benefit the operations of NV Energy in 2020, and assesses whether those benefits justify the cost of the storage system.

Titled “NV Energy Electricity Storage Valuation” (PDF, 933 kb), the report finds that grid-level storage adds the most value to the 2020 NV Energy system by providing regulating reserve, and that a grid-level storage facility in the 2020 NV Energy system may have a positive net present value at today’s storage system prices, provided that regulating reserve from a fast ramp rate resource is valued more than that from a slow ramp rate resource.