Storage is playing a revolutionary role in the further advancement of solar and clean energy. As clean energy capacity increases, ramping up energy storage on the U.S. grid will be critical, regardless of what resource it’s paired with. Over the next decade, the U.S. must dramatically ramp up standalone storage and solar + storage installations to achieve our economic and climate goals. Federal, state and local policy action is needed to unleash the potential of storage nationwide. While storage can be used in many applications, the success of the storage technology is intimately tied to solar because of its potential for meteoric growth in the solar sector.

Solar + storage create business opportunities for each other. As solar production increases, states and solar companies are turning to storage. Energy storage can smooth electricity prices through arbitrage, manage evening energy ramps, mitigate the risk of curtailment, provide black start capability, provide backup power, and more.

The cost of lithium-ion batteries, the most common type of storage paired with solar, has fallen rapidly as manufacturing has scaled up to support both electric grid applications and electric vehicles. For distributed projects, storage can help customers manage the move toward time-of-use (TOU) pricing and later TOU periods, giving system owners access to the power from their solar panels for more hours of the day.

Solar + storage has, and will continue to have, a symbiotic relationship. Ultimately, the wide-scale adoption of solar will lead to the wide-scale adoption of storage, which will in turn lead to more opportunities to deploy solar.