The head of Siemens-Gamesa, Marcus Tacke says the company is to put more emphasis on developing battery storage technology, in order to complement its wind division’s activities.

The world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer now wants to make renewable energy sources available on demand, even when the wind was not blowing and the sun was not shining, thereby requiring more resources in storage. “The missing part is storage,” Tacke said in an interview with the Financial Times. “To unlock the potential growth limitations, that is the piece of technology that needs to be developed.” Tacke pointed out that as the cost of wind turbines has come down, it made sense to pair them with solar or storage to create a more consistent source of power, according to powerengineeringint.com.

As part of its push, Siemens Gamesa has invested more in batteries and other types of energy storage, including a hot rock plant (where surplus power is retained by heating rocks) that helps provide power for an aluminium smelter in Hamburg. The company is also testing a vanadium redox-flow battery system — a niche technology that some people believe could eventually rival lithium-ion batteries for energy storage — at a research facility in Spain.

“Wind is an industry that needs scale to deliver — to leverage research and development costs, to leverage global spread, to leverage suppliers,” said Mr Tacke. “Volume helps to be competitive in the current environment.”