We Can’t Afford to Wait: Energy Storage Incentives in Europe Must be Fit for Purpose

Today is 2030. Or at least, it might as well be. Whether we meet our European greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets in 2030 depends on what we’re doing now – not what we do in 2028 or 2025, what we do here in 2018.

We can’t take success for granted. Despite great progress in renewables, Eurostat, the official data-gathering agency of the European Commission, recently estimated that EU-wide GHGs from fossil fuel combustion actually rose 1.8% in 2017 versus the previous year. So, assuming carbon capture and storage (CCS) doesn’t emerge as a white knight, we need a lot more renewable energy.

That in turn means balancing supply and demand to counteract renewables’ variability. Time-shifting supply and demand so that they better match – not just minute-by-minute, as today, but also season by season from tomorrow on. Energy storage has been widely heralded as the solution here, but are we moving quick enough? Have we done enough to identify the barriers to uptake and how to address them? Perhaps not.

We are going to see a lot of changes in the energy space over the next decade, some of which have already started.

Several countries have pledged to phase out the internal combustion engine (ICE) in favour of electric vehicles (EVs). Companies such as Tesla and Moixa are bringing batteries into our homes. Solar panels continue to get cheaper, and wind turbines taller and more efficient.

Before long, we could even see solar panels printed like newspaper and incorporated into all sorts of fabrics and building materials. One sees windows that convert the invisible parts of the light spectrum into power even as they remain transparent to the human eye.

These solutions will work together to ensure that we have abundant electricity in the future. Yet none will solve the variability issue.

Large scale, decentralised and intelligent energy storage can realistically do so. It is more and more apparent that we can get energy users to shift the pattern of their demand, but that can only be a part of the solution.