Big Moment In Storage. When you walk into RE+ this year you’ll find that energy storage central is central to the conference. For a long time it’s been, when storage makes sense, and this year it will be about many industry participants trying to make sense of energy storage the ecosystem. There are manufacturers, packagers, inverter providers and companies that make this stuff work. On paper, storage has the path to trillions of deployed capital providing the flexibility and resilience that the grid needs. In practice, it will require asset owners and their partners managing their projects with much more granularity than when they managed solar plants.
It’s Getting Simpler. One of the biggest complexity for solar plus storage is leaving, that’s the ITC requirement that only solar generation fuel the battery. Removing that charging limitation, makes it a lot easier to design and operate plants.
Diving Into The Ecosystem. We’ll talk a lot about this because obviously I have a lot to say about the storage ecosystem given that FlexGen plays a central role on the downstream side. As mentioned above there are equipment suppliers, a complicated value chain given recent global events, that will get better over time. The question you’ll want to answer for yourself going into RE+ is what do you do when you receive those batteries and PCS units to your project site and how long will it take to commission it? And then, what could go wrong once you start turning on the revenue faucet?
All About Bankability. A storage ITC means that you also get a market that has not structured development for tax equity and there are very few tax equity providers that have done storage. One thing is for sure, bankability and track record will be the most important question after “what do you do?” and “does your stuff work?”. Having spent the past two weeks talking to infrastructure and tax equity investors about storage, software and control platforms are no longer an afterthought. It all matters…
- Energy Storage News: FlexGen to deliver 100MW ERCOT portfolio for SMT Energy/Susi Partners
- Axios: Chart – America’s surge of spending on clean energy
- PV-TEch: Inflation Reduction Act to add an extra US$110 billion in utility-scale solar investment by 2030
- Bloomberg: US Climate Bill’s Subsidy Bonanza Gives New Allure to Carbon Capture
- Reuters: U.S. natgas futures hit $10/mmbtu for first time since 2008
- NPR: As Germany struggles in energy crisis, more turn to solar to help power homes
- Canary Media: New software can find more room for clean energy on transmission grids
- PV-Magazine: Global study finds over half of consumers want net-zero homes
Opinion
Best, Yann