Government Energy Policy, Business and Technology

There's a Hidden Battery Play in the ‘Extremes’ of Power Prices

Renewable Energy World: There’s an energy-storage opportunity hidden in plain sight -- and it has little to do with electric vehicles.

As batteries go mainstream, the “deepest potential” for them is likely to be in arbitrage, according to a Bloomberg NEF report Tuesday.

It would work like this: Traders buy power when it’s cheap, store it and sell it when it’s expensive, much as commodity brokers do in the oil and agriculture markets. The inability to stockpile electricity has long differentiated power markets from this type of traditional commodity trade, but declining battery costs and volatility in real-time hourly electricity pricing are creating seasonal arbitrage possibilities.

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