By David Frankel, Sean Kane, and Christer Tryggestad
The costs of energy-storage systems are dropping too fast for inefficient players to hide. The winners in this market will be those that aggressively pursue and achieve operational improvements.
Energy-storage companies, get ready. Even with continued declines in storage-system costs, the decade ahead could be more difficult than you think. The outlook should be encouraging in certain respects. As our colleagues have written, some commercial uses for energy storage are already economical. Still more uses will become attractive for utilities, industrial customers, and households, because lower system costs, combined with developments such as the rollback of solar incentives, will make it financially sensible to store power rather than export it to the grid.