Reconciling The Obvious. It’s too early to say that we have a problem, but it’s too late to ignore the problem as much as we are. Largely due to two factors, operators, regulators and politicians are not up in arms about the fact that our energy use will be far larger than our energy generation in a much small time frame than expected. First, we’ve never really faced this problem before. Energy consumption went up at the rate of economic growth and in a very predictable fashion. Mornings and nights at home and day time at the office while everyone filled up their cars at the gas station. Second, power plants didn’t retire at the speed as they are going to because we’ve been extending them beyond their useful life and the plateau on energy consumption has been steady for a few decades. Package that with our replacement generation being variable in nature (for the most part), we have an operational challenge ahead for us that must not be ignored. Fixing the interconnection queues, getting more generation built and then adding markets for resilience, especially fast response, is key for keeping the lights on. Just look at the top two headlines, 58GW of retirements and massive AI data center build out, and you’ll see the problem as well.
UK Postcard. The UK just made some market changes that are having a memorable effect on the storage build out in the Country that is something that every storage owner and investor needs to consider for the future. By expanding the market and adding new products, asset owners need to now adjust their preforms and cycle management. How is their state of charge? Are they compliant with the new rules and how will they manage their augmentation? All of that to say, if they don’t have a digital solution in place to make and continue to adapt to those changes, they will either lose out on revenue, underuse their system or augment their site at the wrong time. When these events occur is the right time to reset the proforma internally and adjust the system by switching the EMS or adding additional data analytics capabilities to the system. More to come on this…
- Utility Dive: Up to 58 GW faces retirement in PJM by 2030 without replacement capacity in sight: market monitor
- Bloomberg: AI Driving US Power Growth Forecast by 81%, NextEra Says
- Axios: View from Houston – CERAWeek’s competing visions
- Reuters: China’s Longi to cut nearly one-third of staff, Bloomberg News reports
- Heatmap: 8 Down-Ballot Races That Could Shape America’s Climate Future
- PV-Tech: FTC Solar reports financial stabilisation following leadership change
- Energy Storage News: Great Britain’s battery fleet dispatching 47% more energy after changes brought in by ESO
- Canary Media: Utah developer quadruples battery storage to meet new electricity demand
Opinion
Best, Yann