Brian McCowan, Zondits staff, 10/13/2022
Wind energy is often criticized as being intermittent and unpredictable. Large-scale energy storage is just as often touted as the solution to that problem. According to a piece published on CNBC’s website, the British firm Centrica is teaming with US-based General Electric to replace an old decommissioned natural gas-fired power generating station with a large battery storage facility. The facility will store and regulate the delivery of electricity from 43 onshore wind farms.
Centrica claims that the facility will have the capacity to store 100 megawatt hours of electricity; the equivalent of the average consumption of electric energy for over 10,000 households in the Lincolnshire region of England. The project is expected to go online in 2023.
The project is just one example of the growth of large-scale energy storage projects associated with renewable energy. Most countries’ climate goals rely heavily on the growth of solar and wind energy. But the inherent intermittent generation from the two sources makes energy storage, whether large-scale or end-use based, mandatory for success.
According to the US Energy Information Agency, the global investment in energy storage for 2022 is expected to be double the $10 billion invested in 2021. The industry is also experiencing expanded merger and acquisition activity with large diverse energy firms acquiring growing energy storage specialists.
More on the Centrica project and the growth of the large-scale energy storage market is found here.