Already this year we’ve been able to learn directly about the energy storage market in Europe from the Energy Storage Summit in London at the end of February and Energy Storage Europe in Dusseldorf, which just took place last week. Andy Colthorpe summarises what he’s seen and heard.
The obvious main difference, is that one (the Summit) basically focuses mainly on one national market, the UK, while of course Energy Storage Europe is a little more open. It is quite a lot more nuanced than that of course, but in London we heard a lot about business cases for specific applications, barriers and opportunities for energy storage, while in Europe, there was still more focus on the drivers for adoption and debate around various technologies and their potential.
Future of European business models is still opaque
Energy Storage Europe’s biggest topics, to my mind, were the relevance of ‘sector coupling’ and the potential for energy storage technologies besides lithium batteries to play effective roles in the global energy transition.
There wasn’t a huge amount of focus on business models, which more than one source told me was something they had hoped to see more of. Perhaps the closest we really got was the announcement that system integrator Younicos has spied a niche in providing energy storage ‘as-a-service’ and will effectively begin renting battery energy storage systems out to commercial and industrial (C&I) entities. This echoes the strategies – examined at length by this site and our journal PV Tech Power – of the US’ leading C&I players in energy storage and also solar PV, the ‘as-a-service’ model.
It’s perhaps unclear if the development of business models is still at such an early stage in Europe that they are not yet discussed, or perhaps if some players were to some extent avoiding making their future strategies public at this stage.
Certainly the view was that the recent RWE-E.On swap deal for shares in RWE’s renewable energy company Innogy is a huge sea change for the paradigm of utility participation in the Energiewende (‘Energy Transition’). The ripples will be felt no doubt across Europe and some that I spoke to at the show said it could point the way forward for the power sector’s big players as they migrate gradually from the central asset ownership model to a more nimble, service-based one.
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