u.s. solar market insight 2014

Declining costs of solar as well as energy storage have made solar-plus-storage solutions take off in several local markets. Behind-the-meter storage coupled with solar opens up new use cases like demand management, time-of-use shifting and bolsters the overall economics for end-customers. From the perspective of utilities and grid operators, solar-plus-storage can alleviate intermittency, ramping and reliability risks. This presentation will address solar-plus-storage end-customer economics, business models, deployments and forecast through 2020.

The industry is high on the promise of energy storage economics, but the project finance community has been slow to respond. With limited track record and a host of companies till trying to build the business model, potential financiers continue to wait on the sidelines. Will the dollars inevitably flow towards storage as it matures or are there unique challenges to the business models and technologies employed by the industry? What are current day challenges for storage project developers in landing deals and how will the market overcome these obstacles? In this sessions, project developers and financiers discuss solutions that will potentially uncork storage project finance bottlenecks.

Moderator: Shayle Kann, Senior Vice President, GTM Research

Energy storage critics would argue that there are more technologies than there are deployments out in the field. In reality however, several energy storage technologies are advancing from early stage R&D to full-scale commercialization with a variety of startups and established players investing in their respective technologies with no clear winner yet. This session will include presentations from leading storage technology vendors and downstream integrators sharing their technology roadmaps and insights from field deployments.

Moderator: Ravi Manghani, Senior Grid Analyst, GTM Research

Spurred by favorable rate structures, the declining cost of energy storage technologies and the always looming “duck curve,” the market for customer-sited energy storage is on the cusp of breaking open. Yet, strong bottlenecks in market educations, project finance, and basic project economics currently stymy the promising industry. This panel of experts in energy storage project development seeks to answer: Where and when does customer-sited commercial storage make sense? What are potential solutions to current bottlenecks in project finance, market support and system economics? Do opportunities to couple solar and storage together improve project viability or needlessly complicate the value proposition? Is one technology necessary to push the other forward?

Moderator: MJ Shiao, Director, Solar Research, GTM Research

Utility-scale storage has the potential to be a powerful force in wholesale markets, however regulatory and market changes are still essential to accelerate deployment. This panel will tackle the current state of utility-scale storage and where the market is headed; including developments in nascent markets such as CA and NY and a discussion on what changes can monetize the benefits of storage and animate new business models.

Moderator: Adam James, Solar Analyst, GTM Research