Energy storage is crucial to enabling new clean energy to serve as firm, reliable electricity generation. Virginia has one of the largest state-level energy storage targets in the country, with a goal to deploy 3.1 GW of energy storage capacity by 2035—enough to power more than 2.3 million homes—and aims to procure 100 percent of its electricity from non-emitting sources by 2045. As the state looks to grow its share of renewable energy, deploying energy storage—and particularly long-duration storage—can help to maximize the utilization of this energy while supporting grid reliability. This brief provides insights from a roundtable hosted in Richmond in June 2024 that explored the opportunity for long-duration storage in Virginia, and the associated market, regulatory, and technological challenges.

Policy Recommendations

Educate businesses, policymakers, and communities about LDES technologies and use cases.

• DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy should include messaging on LDES as one of its “emerging clean energy strategies” through the Clean Energy to Communities program administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
• Utilities, regional transmission organizations (RTOs)/independent system operators (ISOs), consultants, energy modelers, and indirectly, solution providers should educate utility commissioners on the full value of long-duration energy storage resources outside their value as a capacity resource, by providing them with a report of use cases and examples of successful LDES demonstrations and deployments. This report could be modeled after the Virginia Energy Storage Task Force’s Final Report published in 2021.
• The Virginia Department of Energy should conduct a study on the education gaps among policymakers, companies, workers, and the general public, including: potential use cases; economic impacts; and geographic limitations of long-duration energy storage in the state.
  • Informed by the study’s results, Virginia Energy should create an independent organization, modeled after the Virginia Nuclear Energy Consortium, to address public awareness gaps and serve as an educational resource on LDES in the state.
  • This independent organization could also provide guidance to counties on the development of ordinances relating to energy storage to support standardization across the state.

Engage communities proactively, transparently, and comprehensively

• Local governments interested in deploying long-duration energy storage should host collaborative sessions with stakeholder groups to identify their needs, concerns, and interests in the technology, which can help inform permitting decisions and project development processes.

Value the benefits of long-duration energy storage in policy incentives and markets.

• States setting energy storage procurement/portfolio requirements should differentiate between short- and-long duration energy storage.
• States procuring renewable electricity like offshore wind should procure storage in parallel to support grid reliability as the share of renewable energy increases. Before issuing a request for proposals, the state should conduct a commensurate study to determine the type of storage and timing of deployment to identify the most cost-effective solution.

Conclusion

As Virginia looks to scale up its clean energy resources and energy storage capacity, long-duration energy storage provides a unique opportunity to bridge the intermittency of renewables like solar and wind to provide firm, dispatchable, reliable power to the Commonwealth. Growing electricity demand from data centers and other large industrial customers, alongside increasing risks of extreme weather exacerbated by a warming climate, also create an opportunity for LDES to provide additional benefits. Additionally, production of components and construction of projects could create large-scale employment opportunities for Virginia’s skilled workers. However, many policymakers, regulators, developers, and communities remain unfamiliar with the nuances of the technology and opportunities to deploy it locally. Significantly more education about the barriers and opportunities of this technology can help position Virginia to meet and exceed its ambitious energy storage goals.