While Germany is one of the world’s leaders in solar PV and now an early leader in residential energy storage, utility-scale energy storage is still “under discussion” and not yet a mature proposition, industry figures have said.
“The German market as far as I know is pretty much mature when it comes to residential, when it comes to utility-scale and C&I (commercial and industrial) however, to me it is still a lack of regulations and policies which [stop the market from maturing],” Dario Ciccio, global application manager for energy storage systems at global technology group ABB, told Energy-Storage.News at the Energy Storage Europe conference and exhibition in Dusseldorf.
About 50,000 residential energy storage systems have been sold in Germany in the last four years, with ABB among those showcasing a residential product at the show this week, a scalable inverter and 2kWh battery that can be configured to fit three units for a total of 6kWh, allowing households with PV systems to maximise their onsite self-consumption. Germany’s high installed base of residential PV has made it a hotbed for modest but steady growth in the home storage market. The show, which in previous years had appeared to be heavily weighted towards utility-scale solutions, featured a large number of domestic makers of residential systems, such as Solutronic and E3DC which are not heavily promoting their products outside Germany as yet.
ABB was also showcasing an energy storage inverter which can be scaled from 1MW to 100MW but Ciccio said that interest for very large storage systems seemed to be more intense from regions that included the UK, California, Texas and the PJM Interconnection market in the US and regions of Asia such as China, Korea and Japan than from Germany. While Germany has seen a number of high profile pilot projects go online at utility-scale, Ciccio said this interest appeared to have slowed, with outsiders as yet not keen to risk their money on storage at scale.
“We see that there were some major projects in Germany [that] some utilities did, today we see that it’s not really moving fast [as a sector]. The utility-scale projects are very slow, from what I see now,” Cicio said.
“The Energiewende (Germany’s ‘energy transition’) to me is still somehow… investors, are still afraid to make the investment if there is no good balance to move in this direction.”
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