The grid-connected solar-plus-storage market is young, and major activity is limited to a few states. Still, the solar industry is always looking toward the future, wanting to know the impact of incoming technology. The Solar Foundation today offered a first look at how the expansion of storage could impact the solar workforce, releasing a discussion paper at Intersolar North America.
Careful to note that the research is preliminary and relies on several big assumptions, Executive Director Andrea Luecke said about 27,000 jobs related to solar+storage deployment could be added by 2021. The figure includes about 9,000 storage installation jobs tied to solar, and 18,000 solar installation jobs that would not occur absent the availability of storage. The majority of the jobs are projected to be in the residential solar sector.
The full paper is available here.
“In the next few years, storage will be hitting the mainstream in a big way,” Luecke said. “Storage technologies are making solar energy even more reliable, while increasing its appeal among consumers.”
The paper suggested job growth will likely be the result of rapid growth in solar and storage, given that storage deployment is expected to grow nine times larger between 2015 and 2021. In 2015, the energy storage market deployed 221 MW of storage. That number is expected to balloon to 2,081 MW by 2021.
“Storage is where PV was 10 years ago, and I think the future is very bright,” Luecke said. “The vast majority of jobs will be on the residential side, and I think that’s very promising. Over time we anticipate solar plus storage jobs will enjoy a similar path that regular old solar jobs did, and over time efficiencies will help to continue to reduce cost and stimulate demand.”
Residential and commercial solar contractors should take note of the opportunity suggested in the paper, Luecke said, even if it seems foreign at first.
“It’s not as hard to add storage to your portfolio as you may have thought,” she said. “Most of the data in the paper came from executive interviews, and a lot of people said, ‘I can’t do storage—it’s too hard, and I’ll need to double my crew size to do it.’ That’s not the right answer. The right answer you may need to partner with another organization or [take the steps necessary to add this to your offering.] The takeaway is don’t be afraid.”
GTM Research predicts solar plus storage could be a $6 billion market by 2021. Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage research at GTM, provided some context for the paper during a panel alongside Luecke.
“A lot of this growth will come from utility segment, but if you start to look at 2017 forward, we project the behind-the-meter space will surpass the utility segment, and by 2021 you could reach billions of dollars—that includes the system price of solar with storage, including solar,” Manghani said.
The paper also provides an analysis on labor efficiencies in the solar storage market (how many people are required to install a specific amount of solar capacity), finding that utility-scale solar is the most labor-efficient. The paper also raised a number of questions from policy impacts to the effect of various assumptions, indicating where further research is needed.
The paper follows on The Solar Foundation’s National Solar Jobs Census, an annual. The most recent Census 2015 report found that nearly 209,000 Americans were employed in solar in 2015, representing the third consecutive year of roughly 20% job growth. Projections for 2016 show another 20,000 jobs added.
Michael Winkler says
By far, the lowest-cost form of storage for PV is thermal storage. Using an electric heat pump it is possible to simultaneously store energy from PV as both heat (hot water) and cold (ice or chilled water) for later use for domestic hot water and air conditioning or refrigeration. Battery storage seems to be getting all the attention, but thermal storage is much simpler, more durable and is commercially available now. What I call “thermal storage” is usually called, “demand response”, but I think calling it, “thermal storage”, is more accurate and puts it accurately on par with battery storage.