On Monday 15 February the Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) published a document aimed at roughly estimating the future needs for long-term electricity storage in the European Union.
These needs will obviously depend on the composition of the future EU energy mix, which will itself be determined by the measures taken by Member States in the framework of their National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs), available resources and the market, notes CEER.
In imagining future monthly demand and production models based on EU electricity network data for the years 2016 to 2019, regulators nevertheless conclude that there is no foreseeable need for long-term storage in the two Ten-Year Network Development Plan (TYNPD) scenarios for 2030 and 2040.
Indeed, in both scenarios, the share of renewable energy sources will not be sufficient to cover the total energy demand. Such a situation implies that there should be “traditional production technologies” allowing seasonal matching until 2040.
“The need for long-term storage arises when we decide to consider, as a hypothesis, a 100% renewable energy sources power system for the EU” (by 2040), the regulators point out.
According to them, the annual electricity storage needs of the EU, the UK and Norway in such a scenario would be approximately 75-94 TWh, or less than 3% of the total value of annual production.
The European regulators’ analysis also shows that long-term storage needs are strongly correlated with the ratio between wind and solar PV, with solar PV supply being more strongly influenced by seasonality than wind supply.
See the CEER document: https://bit.ly/3qul4jo (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)