By Herman K. Trabish
There are some things that just seem to go together. Like Superman and Lex Luthor, Kim and Kanye, and love and marriage, solar and storage are an obvious pairing, right?
So obvious, in fact, that one utility executive said she felt surprisingly unsurprised by the proposed Tesla takeover of SolarCity. “Solar and storage are always paired in microgrids,” said Lisa Cagnolatti, vice president of Southern California Edison’s customer division at the Grid Edge World Forum 2016 session. “We have been waiting for those markets to come together.”
But the marriage between solar and storage started before Tesla proposed to acquire SolarCity. Last year, the Rocky Mountain Institute published a report saying distributed energy resources paired with storage could pave the way for massive “load defection.” But for utilities, combining solar and storage is another option to boost grid resiliency while integrating more renewables into the power mix.
