What’s the difference between potentially making millions with energy storage assets and losing millions on them? Making the best use of data. That’s the view of Quentin Draper-Scrimshire, CEO and co-founder of Modo Energy. And the fact Modo has an ever-growing roster of clients indicates that a significant proportion of the market shares his view.
Energy storage innovation is largely unsupported in the UK and woefully underfunded. Consequently, the UK is “lagging behind its peers” in the energy storage innovation race. As a result, the UK government is passing up the opportunity to become a global leader in the field.
Concerns about the fire risks posed by lithium-ion battery storage systems continue to mount. Research has shown that there have been around 40 known fires to have occurred in large-scale lithium-ion battery systems. Now a group of politicians in the UK have decided to take action.
Solar projects combined with storage have proved to be particularly attractive to investors in recent months, with the closing of financing deals focussed on the UK market being a notable trend.
With predictions that the amount of energy storage deployed globally could reach almost 500GW by 2031 – according to data from Wood Mackenzie – which battery cell manufacturers are currently best placed to capitalise?
It’s a lustrous, very hard, silvery metal and some would argue that the world’s prospects of bringing about the climate transition are being jeopardised by doubts about its future availability. Cobalt, which is found in the earth’s crust, has been identified as one of the metal ores which must be mined more extensively if storage is to play a key role in future energy systems around the globe. This is because cobalt increases both battery life and energy density. The problem is mining cobalt is fraught with difficulties.
One of the US states currently deploying the largest amounts of grid-scale energy storage is Texas. Indeed, one energy sector CEO recently remarked that the state had “one of the fastest growing markets in the world for energy storage”. So what’s driving the surge in storage deployment in the ‘Lone Star State’?
Excessively large grid-related fees across much of Europe are stifling the wider deployment of energy storage. Indeed, critics argue that tariff structures in many European countries are failing to comply with the EU-level rules on electricity market regulation, which state that tariffs should be “cost-reflective” and not discriminate against energy storage.
White & Case and CMS have been among the most active law firms in the energy storage sector in recent months, advising on deals in the UK, Australia, Belgium and Germany. Energy storage-related project finance, in particular, has been a lucrative source of work for law firms recently.
How can storage investors maximise the value of their assets? In an effort to address this issue, Washington DC-based energy storage services company Fluence – which is on course for annual revenues of around $1.1 billion in 2022 – entered into a strategic partnership with renewable energy software provider Pexapark earlier this year.
Reading-based Anesco, the solar and storage developer that claims to have been responsible for connecting the UK’s first utility-scale battery storage unit, is now turning its attention to expansion in Europe.
Currently, the storage market is dominated by lithium-ion batteries, but the expectation is that lithium supplies will become increasingly hard to access and consequently more expensive. So what other technologies could potentially step in to make up for a shortfall in batteries caused by a lack of available lithium?