The investment manager at pension fund Railpen has downplayed the impact to date of trade disputes on the battery storage industry.
Speaking today at the Energy Storage Summit in London, Cristiana Dochioiu, investment manager at Railpen, one of the UK’s largest pension managers, said rising tensions between rival trading blocs had not yet had a direct impact on pricing in the BESS industry.
Answering a question on the likely impact of trade wars on the battery energy storage system (BESS) supply chain, Dochioiu drew a parallel with the solar industry, where trade disputes between particularly the US and China have become entrenched.
“There might be some impact, potentially, on the solar side as there’s been some tariff implications between the US and China, which obviously would reflect down the stream from raw materials all the way to solar panels [on] pricing. But we don’t see any particular impact on BESS supply.”
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But Dochioiu said an indirect consequence of the elevated threat from trade wars was an increased awareness of the need for “supply chain certainty and security”.
“You see investors trying to book in early slots across different types of technologies, where they’re thinking about their construction portfolio, whether it’s trying to lock in pricing early on, or whether it’s trying to diversify the source of their underlying supply chain,” she said.
“So there are some strategies; I think you need to be very practical in the current environment, given how uncertain this is,” Dochioiu added.
