Two committees of Nevada’s New Energy Industry Task Force committee have issued a policy proposal for energy-storage procurement. The proposal, developed by the Joint Grid Modernization and Distributed Generation & Storage Technical Advisory Committees, states that significant barriers to deploying energy storage exist in the many legacy grid procedures and tariffs that do not contemplate the use of energy storage on the electric grid. Specifically, it states, utility planning, valuation, operations, procurement, interconnection and rate design do not systematically incorporate energy storage.

The proposal includes these provisions:

• Storage procurement targets for utilities should be set for each point of the grid – transmission, distribution and customer-located – to ensure that utility processes impacting each point of the grid are updated to include storage.
• Procurement targets should increase over time to allow for lessons learned to inform future procurement. For example, a small amount of storage procurement should occur by 2019, a larger amount by 2021, and a substantial amount by 2023.
• The PUC should oversee the utilities’ storage procurement activities, including reviewing biannual compliance reports to be filed by utilities on their progress towards achieving their storage procurement targets.

No additional costs would be incurred by Nevadans as a result of the state adopting storage procurement targets, according to the proposal.

The New Energy Industry Task Force was reconvened by an executive order issued by Gov. Brian Sandoval in February 2016, in the wake of the PUC’s contentious decision to dissolve net metering in Nevada.