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New Energy World™
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Is battery storage key to more resilient power networks?
26/10/2022
7 min read
Feature
Electricity has become more precious due to the ongoing energy crisis. Operators are looking for ways to reduce their dependence on natural gas by capturing and storing renewable energy. Michael Lippert, Director of Innovations and Solutions for Energy at Saft, now a subsidiary of TotalEnergies, explains how this makes a strong incentive for battery energy storage systems (BESS).
A decade ago, operators did not specify batteries for time shifting – storing energy from peak production for use later. At that time, the production of solar and wind energy could generally be absorbed easily by the electricity grid. Moreover, given the relatively high cost per installed kWh of battery capacity, doing arbitrage (the practice of storing energy when it is available abundantly at low prices, and releasing [ie selling] energy when prices are high) with a four-hour storage system would not have been economically viable.
However, today we need this level of storage and BESS can provide it. The market is evolving from high-end, short-term applications where value is derived from the power capability of storage systems (eg frequency regulation or wind/solar smoothing) to more energy-oriented, longer-term durations to facilitate the renewables transition.
Energy shifting with BESS
A key advantage to BESS is the ability to ‘energy shift’ (also known as time shifting). As intermittent sources, solar and wind power cannot be turned on or off. For example, a wind turbine may produce a high volume of energy at one point in the day, but the grid may not be able to handle all this power at once. So, it would often be curtailed.