capacity market

Battery storage revenues in Britain are well below historic highs but an appetite for storage capacity remains. Electricity system-operator modernization, increased competition, and new opportunities could all shape the future of British battery energy storage systems (BESS’).

Researchers from Norway have discovered that adding batteries to projects that combine hydropower and floating PV could increase annual profits by as much as 2%, due to revenues from ancillary services and capacity markets.

EirGrid assigned 7.2 GW of capacity in its latest auction, with 5.4 GW to come from gas power plants. The auction clearing price reached €83.050 ($90.554)/MW per year.

A conference about the UK’s electricity market showed organizations are considering the future of the country’s energy sector and how to achieve a net zero economy.

With the Polish government planning to commission five gas power plants over the next five years, London-based thinktank Carbon Tracker has estimated just how costly the move will be, compared to deploying solar plants and energy storage instead.

The retirement of coal baseload capacity, some regulatory adjustments and high energy prices volatility could bode well for the deployment of batteries in Italy, and especially in Sicily. Problems, mostly related to the timing and the structure of the auction, remain, however. We spoke about it with Michele Scolaro, Aurora Energy Research Associate.

Each 1.8 GW of new gas generation capacity could be replaced by 1.7 GW of solar as part of a cleaner, 6.3 GW collection of renewables and energy storage facilities–and that alternative already comes in cheaper than the business-as-usual approach, according to the Carbon Tracker thinktank.

The announcement by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy of an auction which will include solar next year appears to back prime minister Boris Johnson’s claims to be serious about the nation’s net-zero carbon ambition.

The Ministry for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition’s long-term auction was organized by grid operator RTE under the French capacity procurement mechanism. Storage accounted for 253 MW of the capacity assigned in the auction, which was open to all decarbonizing technologies.

The bickering around the British Capacity Market is not over yet. The European Commission has closed its formal investigation into the market mechanism’s alleged violation of EU State Aid rules, finding no violations of that kind. But footing the bill for the year-long suspension of the scheme might prove complicated.