A case study on developing renewable battery energy storage

When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, renewable power producers have to rely on stored energy. Battery energy storage helps suppliers through peak demand times and increases power grid stability. However, current power markets often do not incentivize storage, which has different costs and physical constraints than non-renewables generators.

The United States, China, Australia, and the United Kingdom have all successfully developed renewable energy storage systems. Sun et al. conducted a study of these countries to determine the policies and market mechanisms that could help other countries promote their own energy storage deployments.

“Energy storage development is an essential regulating resource for future intermittent renewables with high penetration to the grid,” said author Huihong Yuan. “We conducted this study in the hope that it can provide useful references for energy storage development in various countries in terms of policy and market-based development.”

The researchers studied the installed capacity and development plans, and analyzed the impact of energy storage policies and business models. From their analysis, the researchers summarized the challenges in each country and proposed targeted solutions.

“We found that the market-oriented development of energy storage has made the best progress in the United States at present,” Yuan said. “I believe that further analyzing the reason for this progress would be helpful to other countries looking to develop energy storage.”

The researchers hope their results will be a useful reference for policymakers, investors, and operators in countries developing energy storage in conjunction with renewables. The researchers intend to continue studying the economics of energy storage, which remains a major challenge to development.

Source: “Development status, policy and market mechanisms for battery energy storage in the US, China, Australia and the UK,” by Jin Sun, Jing Liu, Yangguang Wang, Huihong Yuan, and Ze Yan, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0146184 .