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João Amaral Chief Technology Officer, VoltaliaEnergy storage systems have today a great focus and attention from the market. As the pressure to bring decarbonization and significantly increase the percentage of renewables integrations onto the grid, utilities and IPP rush to bring the best technologies available today and predict the winning technologies in the future. Venture capitals, business angels, investors in general speed to invest in companies that may bring disruption. And it seems to be enough space for all.
There is a massive contribution from all sectors, not just renewables. We move toward a massive electrification of things “Lets call it EoT per complementarity of IoT”and an increasing need to bring power and capacity to mobility and mobile devices. This means that we have seen a huge evolution in all scales of storage, and this also means energy storage systems.
Albeit today storage is often confused with Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), we have many other ways to store energy, being the most popular mechanical, thermal, chemical, each with its pros and cons. The advantage of the growth in today’s current storage outlook, with BESS, is its modularity, the capability to provide all kind of grid services being extremely flexible and the powerful combination with wind and especially solar “As the inverter units may be shared. It is a significant advantage to combine the two systems, and the scale may be utility or even small domestic. As main disadvantages today.” The degradation, regulation and still limited supplier and knowledge bases.
A stable cost, capacity and technology roadmap is crucial for business to be developed. Besides these typical market variables, regulation needs to follow storage in the form that correctly values the addition of this systems to the grid. Today, in many countries, the addition of storage is not properly valued, which requires certain assumptions to be made. When assumptions are made on the duration of the project, these may be significantly impacted by the usage conditions as temperature and certain forms of electrical use may reduce the overall expectancy of the project lifetime.
”Commodities influence the technological trends as well the advances in industrialization of chemical components”
Commodities influence the technological trends as well the advances in industrialization of chemical components. Those two factors should provide a good push for the technologies we will see coming to the market and I believe these should influence the Energy Storage Systems we see today.
Businesses need to engage onto proper systems design, integration, and digitalization. Storage is much about the control capabilities. That is quite visible in the automotive industry, where the control and data gathered from the systems allows significant push, also in already installed systems with over-the-air updates. We will continue to see how important the combination of hardware and software is.
Experts in this field should keep a close eye on the different possibilities to store energy and the most promising technologies that we will see in the future. This means that we will see the combination of many storage sources with likely unique integrations to the grid systems or devices that will need the energy to work with, as we will see in the further that usage of electricity will evolve to a thin control done by the second with multiple devices communicating and taking decisions in real time if they should be able to adjust their demand upon the available production conditions as renewables like solar and wind have their intrinsic volatility. That is, EoT.
