European utility giant EDF has acquired the British energy storage and EV infrastructure developer Pivot Power, following the French state-owned energy firm’s declaration last year that it would invest $10 billion in energy storage by 2035.
The deal gives EDF access to a 2-gigawatt pipeline of projects and to Pivot’s inventive route to market, in the absence of readily available contracted revenue for battery assets.
In Europe, tenders for services such as enhanced frequency response (EFR) have become saturated to a large extent, leaving storage developers to either look for new sources of contracted revenues or take a chance with some merchant risk.
This deal could allow EDF and Pivot to boost deployment against a backdrop of stagnant growth in the U.K.
“EDF has made a lot of noise with ambitions to be a leader of the global energy storage market announced last year,” said Rory McCarthy, senior storage analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “However, they haven’t [followed through on] this with anything in the U.K. market — until now.”
EDF’s last activity in the U.K. storage market was the completion of a 49-megawatt project won in the 2016 EFR tender. The Pivot Power acquisition gives it access to 40 projects, with two of them, both 50 megawatts, expected to be commissioned in 2020. Attention will now turn to the other 38.
“The level of development of these sites is unknown, but it was Pivot’s intention to develop each at 50 megawatts, with an initial portfolio target of 2 gigawatts,” said McCarthy.
The most recent update to Wood Mackenzie’s Energy Storage Outlook forecasts global 2019 storage deployment at around 4 gigawatts, with the U.K. and Germany contributing 600 megawatts of that total.
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