Applications & Installations

The MENA region – the next hot market for energy storage!

“The MENA region – the next hot market for energy storage?” I asked in an article back in October 2017. It took a bit longer than I expected, but seven years later it’s time to replace the question mark with an exclamation mark. It’s hot indeed.
By
Florian Mayr
Image: Huawei

From ESS News

The MENA region is starting to witness a drastic increase in large-scale battery energy storage systems (“BESS”) projects, accompanying a soaring penetration of renewable energy. This has happened at a pace, which seems to have surprised many market analysts.

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In the past, forecasts for the MENA region showed a few GWh for the coming years at best. Usually, the region was not even split into individual countries, but combined into a broad “other” bucket.

However, if you add up the numbers for Saudi Arabia (KSA) alone, we end up at 13 GWh of grid-scale BESS operational or in construction already today. And if we add recent tenders, this will lead to a whopping 33.5 GWh of BESS capacity by 2026. This would make KSA the third biggest global BESS market after the USA and China.

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