Research firm Wood Mackenzie has held onto its forecast that the US will deploy around 7GW of energy storage annually by 2025 and found that 97.5MW / 208MWh of storage was installed during the first quarter of this year.
COVID-19 caused some near-term downside in the market during Q1 2020, particularly in the behind-the-meter segment, Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables notes in the latest edition of its quarterly US Energy Storage Monitor report, but acknowledged that the impacts of the pandemic did not begin to really hit the sector until March and April, meaning that its effect on installations overall was limited.
From conversations with industry participants, Wood Mackenzie found that the market downside was mainly to be found “as a result of challenges relating to customer acquisition, installation and interconnection”. Brett Simon, senior analyst for energy storage at the company tweeted yesterday that the first quarter was “the calm before the storm,” and that the “economy-wide slowdown will bleed into market opportunities” in 2021 as well as during this year.
Although Brett Simon said that forecasts for this year and next have therefore been revised downward to reflect this, overall his firm still believes the annual market in the US will reach 7GW annually by the middle of this decade, having predicted earlier this year pre-pandemic that it expected that figure to be closer to 7.3GW.
The amount of annual deployment expected in 2020 is around 1.2GW, and the market will still exceed the US$1 billion mark in value for this year. By 2025 that figure will be closer to US$6.9 billion annually, according to the Monitor report. The company expects significant growth in residential, non-residential and front-of-the-meter segments, with front-of-meter becoming the biggest segment by far this year and continuing to grow.
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