Over the past few years, grid-scale energy storage has moved from a nascent technology to one widely deployed across the US electric grid.
Since 2021, grid-scale energy storage installations by MW have approximately doubled each year, with over 8 gigawatts (GWs) deployed in 2023 and over 5 GWs deployed as of June 2024, according to Yes Energy’s Infrastructure Insights Dataset.
Operating storage projects are concentrated in ERCOT, CAISO, and NYISO.
Source: Yes Energy’s Infrastructure Insights Dataset
Energy storage deployments are sufficient to impact prices in certain markets such as ERCOT and CAISO. Thankfully, ISOs have started publishing excellent data on the operations of their battery fleets.
ERCOT now has energy storage data that shows fleet-wide charging, discharging, and net output at a five-minute level, and CAISO’s daily energy storage report shows the state of charge, ancillary services awards, and bid curves for the entire storage fleet. Additionally, many ISOs publish generation data at the fuel-type level with energy storage broken out.
Source: ERCOT Energy Storage Resource Data Displayed in Yes Energy
However, understanding how batteries are operating on a granular level can be a bit trickier. There’s no comprehensive public data source on plant-level battery operations. Two datasets, ERCOT SCED and FERC EQR, help you understand how batteries operate.
SCED stands for security-constrained economic dispatch and is the market evaluation of offers to produce a least-cost dispatch of online resources. SCED calculates locational marginal prices (LMPs), and ERCOT runs its SCED every five minutes. ERCOT releases select SCED inputs and outputs in its 60-day delayed SCED disclosure reports.
SCED disclosure data includes unit generation as well as power consumption at the nodal level, so to understand how an ERCOT battery is operating, you need to pull the plant-level generation from SCED as well as the load resource real power consumption from the correct energy storage node. Below, the chart shows the charging and discharging at five-minute granularity for the month of March 2024 for the Byrd Ranch energy storage plant in ERCOT.
Source: ERCOT Energy SCED Data Displayed in Yes Energy
Other ISOs are not as transparent as ERCOT when it comes to publishing plant-level information. That's where FERC Electric Quarterly Report (EQR) data can be helpful. FERC requires all wholesale market participants to submit a record of all sales in wholesale power markets including products sold, purchases, price, and quantity.
You can find plant-level operational data for many batteries by filtering EQR data to certain sellers or geographic locations. EQR contains information about energy as well as capacity and ancillary services transactions, and it contains both pricing and quantity. This means you can glean not only plant dispatch information but information about who is buying the plant, what products they are selling, and how much money they are making on physical transactions. Keep in mind that EQR data is user submitted and may require cleaning and interpretation to be useful. Below,the chart shows the sales quantities of energy and frequency regulation products at the five-minute level from Dynegy Moss Landing 1, LLC for March 2024.
Source: FERC EQR Data Displayed in Yes Energy’s FERC EQR Dataset
With over 250 GW of storage under development in the US, this price-responsive form of energy production and grid stabilization will increasingly play a role in shaping power markets. Understanding how this newer technology is operating can offer a competitive advantage for all power market participants including those developing and operating storage and those trading in the markets.
If you want to chat about energy storage data of any kind, please contact our team or request a demo of our data products.
About the Author: Cliff Rose is a senior product manager at Yes Energy currently focused on building products that help power plant developers leverage wholesale power market data in their decision-making. He has 12 years of experience helping companies navigate power markets in both a consulting and software development capacity. Outside of work, you can find Cliff engaging in stereotypical Colorado activities such as skiing, running, and biking.