If Europe is serious about wind, it must get serious about storage too, says sector chief

If Europe is serious about meeting its grand ambitions of adding 29GW of wind capacity annually until 2030, it must also get serious about setting ambitious targets for long duration energy storage, says sector champion Julia Souder.

Energy storage is therefore a vital tool in helping “stabilise the revenue streams” of wind projects and ensuring that precious green power is not going to waste.

Increasing the “predictability” of revenues from wind projects in turn “encourages greater investment,” said Souder.

It is not just developers that stand to benefit from LDES. Souder pointed to the UK government having paid out “billions of pounds” in curtailment fees over the last few years as an example of what happens if sufficient storage is not in place.

Curtailment fees such as this are “just such a growing number” all around the world, said Souder, with Chile also struggling on this front in the face of its abundant solar power generation.

This has only strengthened the case for LDES as a means of saving excess green power and helping “balance intermittency” from wind and solar farms.

LDES is “stable and reliable,” she said. It brings a “sense of security”.

Tightening up the economics of wind projects can also encourage further capital by ensuring that existing investments made by banks and governments “really do pay out,” she said.

“We need storage targets so that we can really incentivise that partnership to have the wind growth, the solar growth and the storage growth,” she said.

The European Association of Energy Storage estimates that the continent needs to hit 200GW of energy storage by 2030 and 600GW by 2050 to help bring online enough renewable energy to hit decarbonisation goals.

That would require a “massive ramp-up in storage uptake” of at least 14GW a year, compared to the mere 1GW a year that has been seen historically. Like Souder, the association calls for the EU to “urgently” set an energy storage target to avoid curtailing “unprecedented” amounts of clean energy.

Storage targets should also focus on the different durations of LDES, said Souder. “You need the market signals for the eight hours, the 24 and even the 100.”

Market-leading lithium-ion batteries will continue to play their part but Souder emphasised that longer duration energy storage solutions are needed to provide more flexibility.

Lithium-ion batteries can typically provide up to eight hours of storage and are now pushing beyond that figure – “but the costs just start rising exuberantly,” said Souder.

“With onshore and offshore wind, you might have wind blowing non-stop for two days, and then it just stops for a week,” said Souder. “So having some of the durations that can last 24-100 hours is really important for that flexibility.”