Richmond, Virginia Roundtable on Long Duration Energy Storage

Long-duration energy storage (LDES) will be crucial to Virginia’s clean-energy transition, as energy demand grows rapidly in the coming decades and the expansion of intermittent renewable generation requires support to ensure reliability and resiliency. Deploying LDES strategically and responsibly will enable the state to utilize its renewable resources to their greatest potential.

Stakeholders at all levels—whether industry representatives, policymakers, regulators, community members, or private sector companies—require significantly more education on the technologies, opportunities, and potential physical and economic impacts of LDES and how it could contribute to the clean energy transition.

Policymakers, regulators, and developers must differentiate between short- and long-duration energy storage to: (1) ensure that the value and benefits of long duration storage can be captured in incentive structures and energy markets; (2) enable local communities, policymakers, and the general public to develop an understanding of the differing environmental, physical, and economic impacts of the projects; and (3) ensure workers, especially emergency response workers, are aware of the different safety protocols for differing battery chemistries and can safely respond to potential issues.

Developers should authentically and transparently engage with communities from the earliest possible phase of the project to ensure communities’ needs are heard and addressed, and to provide answers to communities’ questions about potential impacts to the environment, viewshed, and local economy. This can both accelerate project development by streamlining the permitting process and ensure that communities benefit from projects in their region. Clearly designating storage technologies as long duration and educating the public on the specifics of their components and operations can help developers engage more comprehensively with communities.

• 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, RTOs/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 LDES use cases and examples of successful LDES demonstrations and deployments 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 then 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.

• 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.

• States setting energy storage procurement/portfolio requirements should differentiate between short duration 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.