Statkraft says development of zero-carbon system services, and a revised DS3 budget, is key to meeting renewable targets
Statkraft Ireland’s Head of Grid Services, Bernice Doyle, gives keynote address at inaugural Energy Storage Ireland conference.
Statkraft’s Head of Grid Services Bernice Doyle said that it is likely that Europe’s energy storage capacity will triple between 2021 and 2023. Speaking at the inaugural Energy Storge Ireland conference, Doyle also said that utility-scale storage will see the significant portion of this growth.
Statkraft developed, constructed and is now operating the first grid-scale battery project in Ireland- 11MW Kilathmoy- and more recently opened a second 26MW facility called Kelwin-2 near Tarbert in Kerry. Statkraft’s independent markets division also provides optimisation and trading services for these batteries, in addition to over 108MW of operational batteries on behalf of other developers and asset-owners in the Irish market.
Speaking about the future of grid services and energy storage, Doyle said, “Future market design must incentivise and facilitate longer duration storage battery and any programme of work must examine, not just the market framework, but also the market systems that will facilitate it.”
“The existing DS3 budget, which was originally sized to allow Ireland meet its 2020 renewable targets, must be reviewed and revised. We have a 2030 renewable target but not the system services budget to match. We know that we will need more services and we know that we will have more applications for things like storage, so we need to upgrade the budget in the short-term to maintain and develop the pipeline.”
The conference heard that Ireland has 2.5GW of storage projects in development and more than 400MW of that should be operational by the end of 2021.
Doyle concluded by saying, “Time is of the essence. We’ve made our commitments. We have set our 2030 targets and they are hugely challenging. Electricity has proven that it can pull its weight in terms of delivering on these targets and it can do more than most other sectors. We need to put the focus on tackling the barriers that exist and making sure that electricity delivers above and beyond the 2030 targets.”
Developing batteries and hybrid storage systems is a key part of Statkraft’s global strategy and it sees the development and effective market optimisation of grid services projects, such as batteries, as key to meeting Statkraft renewable energy targets.