The truth about the booming battery energy storage market

Elsewhere, startups are focusing on behind-the-meter systems for residential energy storage, but the same concept applies: integrating a group of batteries or solar-plus-storage systems to provide services to the grid or participate in energy trading. Several players in Europe are currently exploring different types of integration models that could make residential energy storage more viable. In the UK, local player Moixa has proposed a "shared grid" program where qualified battery storage customers can sign up and receive cash, under which the company can intelligently manage their batteries to help balance the grid. As the company's website explains, shared grid "each Moixa battery has a smart brain built into it to combine the stored energy (or backup capacity) of each user. Participants are usually rewarded through a fixed annual fee or a portion of the total revenue."

Since every electric vehicle contains a battery and can potentially be integrated with other batteries to provide grid services, the potential for battery integration is intertwined with the expanding electric vehicle market, so its development potential is huge. TenneT, a European transmission system operator that primarily serves Germany and the Netherlands, is exploring ways to integrate the flexible capacity of electric vehicles into the grid. In a pilot project in the Netherlands, renewable energy company Vandebron will work with customers who own electric vehicles to help TenneT balance the grid through the capacity of the car batteries provided by the customers. The effort is considered groundbreaking because of its novel use of blockchain technology to create a highly responsive, permissioned network. The blockchain is usually associated with direct trading platforms and is often used as a virtual ledger.

It records a growing list of transactions, which are often linked and protected using cryptography. In this case, the blockchain tracks the availability of each car battery and records its behavior and reactions in response to signals from the grid operator. This allows the battery to respond precisely to changes in the grid in just a few seconds at a time without affecting the user's ability to charge their car. TenneT is also working with the Sonnen Group, a German residential battery storage provider, to trial a similar blockchain network for residential solar cells. Advances in digital technology are also opening the door for electricity consumers to directly participate in the energy sector.

Several companies are experimenting with blockchain-enabled peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platforms that facilitate the sharing of energy storage and/or self-generated electricity directly between homeowners or businesses. Households participating in pilot projects in New York, Australia, Germany, and Bangladesh can now trade small amounts of green electricity through blockchain platforms and microgrid management systems (most of which have storage components).92 Together, these technological developments point to the potential for the emergence of an energy “cloud” environment in which all users can access and trade shared energy on demand without the need to worry about middlemen.

Zhidongxi believes that in recent years, the leaps in adjacent digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, predictive analysis and blockchain are multiplying the use of battery energy storage deployment and increasing its benefits. These complementary mechanisms not only improve battery performance and cost, but also make the concept of battery energy storage gradually become a reality. Although "energy storage" and "renewable energy" often appear in the same sentence, energy storage is more than just combining intermittent wind and solar output: battery energy storage solutions can be deployed quickly and precisely, and it can improve the efficiency and resilience of the entire power grid, regardless of the power generation source. This makes the concept of energy storage even more fascinating.