Episode 13: Key Capture Energy’s Jeff Bishop on the Critical Role of Storage in Greening the Grid

Jeff Bishop, CEO and co-founder of Key Capture Energy, got his start in the energy business 20 years ago developing wind farms in New York and around the world. In 2016, he and New York native Dan Fitzgerald crunched the numbers and saw the future in battery storage. Together, they formed Key Capture Energy. The Albany-based company has 54 megawatts of storage in operation  in New York and Texas, with an additional 200 MW under construction and a whopping 2.5 gigawatts in development in the Northeast and in Texas. 

As New York moves to a zero-emission grid, mandated by the CLCPA to be in place by 2040, energy storage plays a critical role. The state has called for 3,000 MW of storage by then. But Bishop said those numbers are just part of why Key Capture Energy is investing in New York.

“New York is doing everything all at once,” he says. “A bunch of offshore wind, retirement downstate of dual-fuel peakers, all of this just leads to a grid that needs battery storage.”

“Markets have traditionally rewarded what is economical but they need to reward what the grid needs five years from now,” Bishop explains. At the NYISO, our work preparing markets for energy storage led the nation with new rules already in place to broaden the ability of storage to bolster the reliable use of renewable resources.

“We need it all,” says Bishop, referring to the many technologies expected to be serving the grid by 2040. “We need those 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind to come into Long Island and New York City. We need the rooftop solar. We need all sorts of distributed solar. We need transmission upgrades. And we need energy storage.”

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