London — * Stakeholders 'to walk the talk' of 2016 report* Existing business models 'limited'* Unintended consequences raise regulatory risk Receive daily email alerts, subscriber notes & personalize your experience. The UK's Carbon Trust has brought together Centrica, DONG Energy, SSE, Scottish Power, Wood Group--clean energy, and Statoil to demonstrate the electricity system benefits of energy storage, project manager Nils Lehmann told S&P Global Platts Tuesday. In a first step, the Energy Systems Innovation Platform (ESIP) is to investigate use cases for energy storage that help integrate wind energy into the grid. The platform will also look at solutions to regulatory and other barriers preventing investment in storage that, according to a 2016 Carbon Trust report, could save the UK up to GBP2.4 billion ($3 billion) a year by 2030. "ESIP will walk the talk of that report, acting on the insight that a multi-stakeholder effort by government and industry is needed to release system benefits," Lehmann said. The aim is to balance the business interests of energy companies with government objectives to deliver a secure, decarbonized system at least cost. "The potential system benefits are so large that each stakeholder can have a viable business case yet the end customer still wins," Lehmann said. For now, viable business models for storage are limited, Lehmann noted, and may even be causing unintended negative consequences to the system as a whole. This was the case for solar panel owners using battery storage in the home solely to maximize self-consumption. "Residential end users don't compete with the wholesale price, but with the price they would otherwise pay for power from the network," Lehmann said. "That includes taxation. However, a business case which depends on avoided taxation is not helpful from a systems perspective," he added. The added costs of this are spread across all users, including those who cannot themselves afford storage. This is unfair, Lehmann said, and is likely to attract regulatory intervention. If, however, storage benefits the system as a whole, "there is a rationale for government to help end users or industry realize that effort, and it de-risks energy storage efforts," he added. The Carbon Trust's storage report shows that, for domestic solar and storage, the best outcome for all is to aggregate the domestic storage solutions. Then home solar/battery systems can provide flexibility services to the network, benefitting the wider system. The Carbon Trust analysis shows that this can earn more for the end user than using it solely to maximise self-consumption, Lehmann said. --Henry Edwardes-Evans, henry.edwardes-evans@spglobal.com--Edited by Jeremy Lovell, jeremy.lovell@spglobal.com
The UK's Carbon Trust has demonstrated the benefits of energy storage to major suppliers, including Centrica, SSE, Scottish Energy, Dong Energy and Statoil. Its Energy Systems Innovation Platform project will investigate how to integrate wind energy into the grid using energy storage systems and how to remove barriers to investment in energy storage. A new report by the UK Government on its plans for a low-carbon economy shows that it is not just about cutting greenhouse gas emissions but also creating jobs and boosting economic growth.