Measuring Energy Storage System Performance: A Government/Industry- Developed Protocol

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, Energy Storage Systems Program, through the support of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) and in collaboration with many stakeholders and interested parties, developed and published a protocol (i.e., pre-standard) for measuring and expressing the performance characteristics for energy storage systems (ESS) in 2012. The protocol has served as the basis for formal standards being developed by U.S. standards development organizations (SDO) and international standards through the International Electrotechnical Commission. The access to such a protocol or pre standard by any SDO significantly reduces the time it can take to develop and process formal consensus standards. In addition, until formal standards are completed and published, such a protocol provides a ‘benchmark’ for addressing ESS performance. This fills a gap that, if left unfilled, presents a challenge to anyone interested in uniformly and accurately assessing ESS performance and comparing systems.

Recognizing energy storage technology development and deployment is growing at a significant rate and in response to market needs PNNL and Sandia, with the assistance of a wide range of stakeholders, have completed and published an updated version of the protocol (the April 2016 Protocol Revision 2). The revised document includes five new applications – PV smoothing, volt/var, renewables firming, power quality and frequency control as well as enhanced details around the previous content and new organization of content and coverage of other new performance metrics and system specifications.

In this webinar, authors of the updated protocol presented the revisions and enhancements to this document.

Panelists:

• Dr. Imre Gyuk, Program Manager, Energy Storage Research, Office of Electricity Delivery & Energy Reliability, U.S. Department of Energy

• David Conover, Senior Technical Advisor, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

• Vilayanur Viswanathan, Senior Engineer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

• David A. Schoenwald, Principal Member Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories

A summary of the content presented in this webinar is available here.

This webinar was a presentation of the Energy Storage Technology Advancement Partnership (ESTAP). ESTAP is supported by the US Department of Energy Office of Electricity and Sandia National Laboratories, and is managed by the Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA).