Weighted Carbon offset system with energy storage

An energy infrastructure with energy storage capacity changes the kinds of energy generation sources you could use to power a grid. Energy storage does not directly displace forms of power generation that result with greenhouse gas emissions, but it enables the reliable use of renewable sources of energy such as wind power and solar. How could you have a carbon dioxide reduction policy that provides a cost benefit for encouraging energy storage systems within the mix? How would you quantify such a system? Could you consider an accounting system that measures charge and discharge cycles of storage and matches this up with the sources of energy to determine if the use of the storage has resulted with a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions overall? A mathematical analog might be the imaginary component of complex numbers. In any transfer of energy over time the net energy doesn’t change but if some of it is stored and returned again when needed you could use intermittent sources of renewable energy to displace carbon-based generation. There is a system wide benefit to having a storage capacity but it may not be cost-effective now to install that kind of technology if it is only the generation of energy alone that is looked at with carbon trading schemes.

Could you base carbon-offset policies on a reliable provision of energy from renewable sources over a given amount of time? Could the financial gain from a reliable output, or throughput, of energy from renewable sources be weighted by the continuous length of time that a continuous amount of energy is delivered to the grid? The greater the time that sources of renewable energy with energy storage deliver reliable amounts power to the grid, the better the financial gain. Organisations would then be relatively worse off financially for delivering renewable energy intermittently to the grid even if that was for large amounts of energy. With energy storage there would be less of a need for peak load generation, unless there are generation capacity deficits in the system.

Intermittent supplies to the grid have a limited value if you still need polluting power stations to provide the stable backbone to a grid. If, for example, you could couple renewable sources of energy such as wind farms with energy storage so that it could deliver a steady amount of power to the grid for weeks at a time, then you could rely on that steady output and plan to have renewables with storage replace coal-fired power stations, and close those coal-fired power stations down. You might need a large margin above the generation capacity of a coal-fired power station for the renewable energy and energy storage replacement and you would need a smart grid, but overall this is a strategy that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.