Britain could be the best “scale-up” market in the world when it comes to deploying energy storage batteries, leaning on years of experience in solar PV, the chief of one manufacturer has said.
Simon Daniel, an inventor and entrepreneur, is CEO of Moixa, which makes residential and small-scale energy storage systems. The company was one of the earliest in the UK to develop an offering based around providing services to the grid while also allowing homeowners to store and self-consume solar energy.
The company has deployed over 1,000 systems in the UK to date, with Daniel often making analogies about the simplicity of the installation process to that of home cable TV installations, while Moixa’s battery systems, tailored for the UK market, tend to be smaller sized and less aimed at high income individuals than rival systems.
“…While it is not the best early adopter for [energy] storage, it is probably the best scale-up market in the world because of the way organised, multi-thousand projects for solar were funded and deployed historically,” Daniel said.
“There are probably around 50,000-plus batteries deployed in Europe today, but we see pipelines in the UK that could exceed that and it’s just a question of the economics and the process.”
Simon Daniel was speaking to Solar Media journalist David Pratt, who has written an article; “UK storage charges ahead”, for the Storage & Smart Power section of the latest edition of Solar Media’s downstream solar industry technical journal, PV Tech Power.
The article looks at the residential, commercial and industrial (C&I) and utility-scale energy storage industries in Britain and the reasons behind the likes of Enel citing the country as having “one of the most advanced markets in the world”.
From tenders for grid services like EFR (enhanced frequency response) and the capacity market coming from transmission network operator National Grid driving activity in the large-scale market, to an “overlooked” C&I space, to the aforementioned potential for scale-up at household level, the feature article looks at the diverse drivers and considerable excitement behind energy storage in the UK.
Also included is a dive into Solar Media’s market intelligence division’s report on the UK’s utility-scale energy storage pipeline from analyst Lauren Cook, which is now up to 3.5GW, the research team found.
You can download “UK storage charges ahead” by David Pratt and Lauren Cook here.
You can download the entire issue of PV Tech Power Vol. 12, including the dedicated Storage & Smart Power section, presented by Energy-Storage.News, here.