Energy Storage Economics 101: Finding the Business Case


This is the balancing market in Poland this week, July 15th. The peak two hour period in the middle of the day saw electricity prices at nearly 1000 PLN/MWhr. That is over twice the price of renewable energy in Poland even with subsidies included. 

It does not take a genius to see the potential of storing the energy on each end of this spectrum and selling it in the middle. The system must have the production capacity to meet the peak at any time, even though it is used only two or three hours a day. Shifting peak hours to off-peak electricity that is stored, if ubiquitous enough, would lower the need for additional capacity and save everyone money as well. The major energy storage issue is quantifying the economic benefits and finding the optimum methodology of distributing the cost of storage to the beneficiaries of storage. This is not an easy thing and is exactly why we need an association to work to pull all the pieces together and build a consensus of the results.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hitting Reality: Polish Energy Policy Meets the Facts

Polish Prime Minister Wants us to Fight for the Right to Burn Coal.... from Russia!