Market Trends of North America Thermal Energy Storage Industry
This section covers the major market trends shaping the North America Thermal Energy Storage Market according to our research experts:
Power Generation Sector to Dominate the Market
- Excess generation available during low demand time can be used to charge a thermal energy storage system, in order to increase effective generation capacity during high-demand periods, which result in higher load factor for the plants, helping them to generate energy in a stable way.
- In North America, energy storage technology aids the grid operators in managing variable energy generation from renewable, like solar and wind energy. Utilities use energy storage technologies in a range of applications, such as time-shifts and supply capacity, in order to meet the demand-supply gap efficiently, hence, driving the thermal energy storage market.
- The four large CSP thermal storage systems in the country make up over half of the grid-tied thermal storage capacity in the United States. These are all tied to concentrated solar power systems where the sun's rays are reflected off mirrors and concentrated onto a receiver, thus heating it. The thermal storage is expected to play in terms of the ongoing ramping up of renewable electricity in the country.
- Clean development mechanism (CDM) envisaged by the Kyoto Protocol, is also a significant push toward CSP technology, which is expected to increase the demand for thermal energy storage system during the forecast period.
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The United States to Dominate the Market
- North America is one of the leading regions in the global thermal energy storage market, due to high energy storage capacity and an increase in the energy mix of thermal energy specifically in the United States, which is expected to be the largest market during the forecast period.
- The current energy storage technologies associated with the United State's grid are pumped-storage hydropower (PSH), thermal storage, batteries, compressed air energy storage (CAES), and flywheels. Thermal storage accounts for about 29% share in the United States energy storage capacity, with around 165 projects of capacity 669MW installed as of 2018.
- Moreover, several R&D activities are going on globally for increasing the efficiency of conventional TES. For instance, with funding from the United States Department of Energy's (DOE's) SunShot Initiative, the Argonne team is expected to build a pilot-scale prototype of its high-efficiency latent heat thermal energy storage system (LHTES) for testing. The SunShot Initiative is a national collaborative effort to make unsubsidized solar energy cost-competitive vis-à-vis other forms of electricity production by 2020.
- Further, CSP in the United States is supported by the government's supportive regulations and policies, like the Federal Investment Tax Credit, Energy Policy Act, in turn promulgating the thermal energy storage market.
- Therefore, the above mentioned factors are expected to bolster the thermal energy storage market in the United States.
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