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This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at www.nrel.gov/publications.
2 The Role of Energy Storage Testing Across Storage
Market Development (Best Practices for
Establishing a Testing Laboratory)
This section of the report discusses the architecture of testing/protocols/facilities that are needed
to support energy storage from lab (readiness assessment of pre-market systems) to grid
deployment (commissioning and performance testing). It does this by summarizing international
literature and reports as well as summarizing testing software and energy storage analysis
software more broadly.
2.1 Good Practices with Storage Systems.
The issue of how to install, use, and decommission a storage system is now happening very
regularly and has been documented by both international and national task groups. Such analysis
contains a part with general validity and a part that is dependent on the local system, including
the availability of an electricity grid, the reliability of the grid, the share of renewables in the
grid, multi-benefit solutions, but also weather conditions that require specific storage housing
(such as requiring the system being a meter above ground level for potential flooding).
Unfortunately, reports by national task forces are written mostly in the local language, making
them more difficult to find—but translation software can be helpful once found.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of valuable reports that the working group has relied on when
becoming familiar with storage testing.
2.1.1 International Reports
“Electric energy storage – future storage demand” by International Energy Agency (IEA) Annex
ECES 26, 2015, C. Doetsch, B. Droste-Franke, G. Mulder, Y. Scholz, M. Perrin.
Despite the future demand in the title, this is a fraction of the total contents. The extensive report
gives insight into the technical and economic framework for electric energy storage systems in
the first 50 pages. It also contains an overview of all applications, based on a meta-analysis of
other studies, such as those from Sandia and the Electric Power Research Institute. The report
discusses the other system options besides storage such as demand side management and voltage
support by inverters. These alternatives are explained. Testing the storage is an important section
(40 pages are dedicated to it), covering technological dependent tests as well as application
dependent test methods. For more information, see http://dx.doi.org/10.24406/UMSICHT-N-
484738.
“European White Book on Grid-Connected Storage,” DER-Lab, 2012
The distributed energy resource lab is a consortium of European laboratories for distributed
energy sources. They publish white books regularly. This white book focuses on storage systems
as seen from the grid (including converters), rather than on the storage technologies. Issues such
as technical requirements, especially interconnection issues, tariff structures, and, more
generally, economic aspects, test procedures for selecting storage, , are covered. For the report,
see https://der-lab.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/noe_003_grid_connected_storage.pdf.