Energy Storage—The New Era of Power Sector

Abstract

The new era of the energy sector encircles around alternate sources of energy, the truth in the phrase has now been well understood and accepted by even the toughest critic of change. The revolution in the energy sector started way back in the last century but it was more dispersed in nature. Also, the need of an alternate source of energy was not felt then with the abundance of fuel sources like coal and gas. The world became conscious of the emissions from coal-based power generation but was quiet as it did not have a strong enough substitute to support their concern. With the invent of renewables the world for the first time found a voice to raise concern. For the first time there was someone who had the potential to reduce the dependency on coal for power generation. Renewables being agile, compatible and flexible in design brought about changes in the otherwise rigid power sector. The sector which was overtly a B2B industry started to open. Industry started to talk about decentralization of power, decarbonization of grid and concepts like open access, distributed generation to name a few. The period between 2008 to 2015 saw many new types of technologies coming up and giving more options of generating power commercially. The paper is an effort to describe the development of the power sector, its concerns, the enablers and the way forward.