The value of energy storage increases with growing shares of renewable energy on the grid, but the availability and cost of storage will determine how successful decarbonisation with renewables can be.
The reuse of electric vehicle (EV) batteries in stationary storage systems offers great possibilities, but investors still need to gain confidence in the ‘second life’ battery concept, the CEO of a company behind a new project in England has said.
Capacity payments that solar-plus-storage developers could earn from winning in Portugal’s big 700MW solar tender are an interesting first step, but will likely only be a supplementary income to add to what could be earned from ancillary services.
A new project is underway in the US to tear down a significant barrier for “realising the full benefits” of energy storage: the complexity and lack of clarity over interconnection rules across the country.
While lithium-ion batteries continue to take the dominant share of new installations by some distance, there are a variety of other technologies looking to complement, combine or even compete. Panellists at the Energy Storage Digital Series looked at the questions of which energy storage technologies are the likeliest contenders for that future.
In the past few months Spain has announced a 2.5GW energy storage target by 2030 and Portugal is hosting a solar tender with a significant add-on option for storage. Clean Horizon’s experts Corentin Baschet and Tanguy Poirot spoke with Andy Colthorpe on the role batteries and other storage can play in the Iberian Peninsula’s energy transition in the present and future.
UPDATED 14 July 2020: The European Union has agreed that energy storage will be vital in its clean energy economy of the future as Members of European Parliament (MEPs) voted overwhelmingly to adopt a strategy report putting energy storage and hydrogen at the heart of its agenda.
What has been described by the head of its federal regulator as the “single most important act” the US could take in smoothly transitioning to a “clean energy future” will become reality, with distributed energy storage set to join wholesale markets and compete to provide services on a “level playing field” with fossil fuel resources.
