The Australian energy industry has gathered online for the Energy storage: leading the transition virtual conference, which was held on Thursday 2 July.
More than 700 delegates registered to attend the virtual conference, which was hosted by Energy Editor Laura Harvey. During the three-hour conference, speakers explored the transitioning energy market in Australia and the role that energy storage will need to play as we strive to increase the level of renewable energy in our national grid.
The conference commenced with a presentation from Hydro Tasmania’s Battery of the Nation (BotN) Project Director, Christopher Gwynne, who provided a very well received update on the BotN project.
Delegates were particularly interested in the concept of deep storage which Mr Gwynne introduced – storage with the ability to operate over many hours as an optimal, least-cost choice, a category which BotN falls into.
“Up until recently storage was just storage, but recently we’ve started to point to big differences between what you might call shallow and deep storage,” Mr Gwynne said.
Shallow storage essentially is storage that is four to six hours worth of storage in terms of its duration. Deep storage has a longer duration, in the range of ten to twelve hours.
As the market transitions to having more input from renewable sources, forms of short, or shallow storage, are the ones we need in place first. But according to Mr Gwynne, most of the analysis that’s going on around the world is showing that as markets move further into their transformations, longer, deeper storage options will be required in order to maintain a stable and reliable power system.
“What this means is that by the mid to late ‘20s, we’re going to need some of these longer duration, deep storage assets to start to come into the market,” Mr Gwynne said.
“The value of this type of storage is in the fact that it’s better placed to manage longer term variations in supply, like what we might see during a wind drought, or a successive number of days of low solar output in the system.
“When dealing with these conditions, you’re going to need deep storage to help manage the reliability of the system.”
Next up, Matt Rennie, Energy Transition Lead Partner at EY, discussed storage opportunities in the evolving energy market.
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