Prof. Richard L. Revesz and Dr. Burcin Unel provide a useful, albeit no longer current, review of electric energy storage in Managing the Future of the Electricity Grid: Energy Storage and Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Managing). The energy storage market has continued its rapid technical and manufacturing evolution. Those advances may reasonably be expected to impact today’s regulatory aims and frameworks, just as prior technological progress influenced administrative goals and processes.

In their paper, Managing the Future of the Electricity Grid: Energy Storage and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Richard L. Revesz and Burcin Unel of New York University School of Law (NYU team or authors) highlight a critical (and often times contentious) issue that the energy industry is attempting to address: how to quantify and incorporate a societal value of decreased greenhouse gas emissions into the dollar value of incremental energy that is provided to the electric system.

The view that promoting the use of energy storage systems produces environmentally attractive results has been standard in policy circles. Policymakers have been enthusiastic about energy storage systems primarily because of their belief that cheaper and more prevalent storage options could help facilitate the integration of increased renewable energy generation and speed up the transition to a low-carbon grid. This beneficial outcome, however, is not guaranteed.