Guest Post: Can we store electricity to transform the grid?

Over the next several weeks, we'll be joined by Robert Fares, a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin researching the benefits of grid energy storage as part of Pecan Street Inc.'s ongoing smart grid demonstration project . Robert will be contributing a series of guest posts discussing grid storage technologies, and how storage could benefit the electric grid. It may come as a surprise that essentially no electric energy is stored between the point of generation and the point of delivery in today's electric grid. Each kilowatt-hour you consume in your home is generated, transmitted, and delivered to your particular electrical outlet in real time. In other words, the present electric grid operates totally on demand. This seemingly inefficient operating paradigm stems from the high cost of electricity storage technologies; it is less expensive to oversize every component of the grid to serve peak energy demand than it is to store electric energy. [More]