Emerging Best Practices for Modeling Energy Storage in Integrated Resource Plans: An overview and a comparison

Energy storage technologies are a unique class of energy resource, capable of providing service across the electric grid’s four functional levels: generation, transmission, distribution, and customer (Koohi-Fayegh and Rosen 2020). The rapid growth of intermittent energy resources, driven by state and utility decarbonization goals, is creating a growing need for energy storage to match unpredictable generation with customer demand (Gür 2018). However, the primary tool that many utilities use to identify grid investments—the integrated resource plan (IRP)—was not designed to consider the unique characteristics of energy storage.