Although many projects are still in the approval stage, storage promises to grow exponentially in the coming period, stimulated not necessarily by European funds but by very high returns on investment and the need to ensure cheap off-grid energy, say investors and experts surveyed by Energynomics.
“Some storage projects have an investment return (IRR) of over 30% in the medium term. We have seen a return on investment even after the first year,” says one expert.
“There is a lot of interest in storage from investors who already have parks. Not all of them want to deliver energy to the grid, so many resort to behind-the-meter projects, which do not report data to the authorities, because they are used only for their own consumption. Now you don’t even need approvals, you can put a few containers on a plot of land and quickly wire it,” claims another expert.
The problems arise, however, with projects that deliver energy to the grid. Large voltage variations force distributors to make new investments, especially to comply with the new standard variation range imposed by ANRE (of -10 and +5%), and many projects do not communicate their true capacity to distributors.
However, storage will increase unprecedentedly from now on. There are three large local battery production projects, and in March sources claim that the first factory project, with an annual production capacity of 2GW, will be put into operation near Bucharest.
At the same time, the costs for an installed MW have decreased almost three times compared to the first wave of renewables.
“The lack of need for storage in the design of Wave 2 of renewables was a mistake. Things were quite predictable from the perspective of the years 2017-2019, when the foundations of this new wave of investments were laid. When prosumers started to have favorable legislation in 2018, it was obvious that there would be a development – perhaps not as fulminant as it happened previously, but it was clear that they would start to have a say in the system, or, this leads, little by little, to an overcapacity in a certain technology. What does this do? It alters the price. And when it alters the price, it alters the business case, it creates the need for the next business case, namely that of batteries, which, as we see, is economically feasible today. Only today do we see how necessary the investment in batteries is – from “opportune” it becomes “mandatory”, because the business cases focused on mono-technological, solar power plants will no longer stand without storage”, claims Martin Moise, vice president of Patres, at the Brașov Energy Day.
More details to be presented in the Energynomics magazine Q1 2025.
