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Barbados creates national energy storage policy, eyes billions of investment

Posted on August 29, 2022 by dishanth

The government of Barbados has created a national energy storage policy and sees billions of investment potential in the sector, a minister has said.

Minister of Energy Kerrie Symmonds said on Monday (22 August) that the government had created the policy with the anticipation that storage would be the next frontier in renewable energy investment, according to local news outlet Barbados Today.

The most significant part of the policy is that all large-scale renewable resources, “such as five or ten megawatts”, Symmonds said, would have to include energy storage.

The plan is to have centralised energy storage assets owned by utilities as well as privately-owned systems, including small systems owned by households, for which the government has so far granted 4,000 licenses.

Speaking in the annual general meeting of the Barbados Renewable Energy Association (BREA), Symmmonds said: “It is anticipated that energy storage systems will be unlocking US$3.5 billion in investment for this country. Government does not contemplate a single storage solution but instead is contemplating several grid-related services.”

Energy-Storage.news has asked the Barbados government’s communications department if the quoted figure is US dollars or Bajan dollars, the latter of which would equate to US$1.75 billion based on today’s exchange rate of 1:0.5, and will update the story in due course.

Symmonds continued: “Services which reduce or eliminate the need for energy curtailment will be of the greatest interest to the Government and will also be a type of service that should be of the greatest interest to independent power producers and investors.”

As Energy-Storage.news reported earlier this year, Barbados is targeting 100% renewable energy use and carbon neutrality by 2030. In April, the Inter-American Development Bank issued a request for expressions of interest (IOE), on behalf of the country, for consulting services to help develop a competitive procurement framework for utility scale renewable energy capacity and energy storage.

It emphasised that the government wished the procurement to be technology-agnostic, something also alluded to in Symmonds’ recent comments.

Source Energy Storage News

Western Australia utility replicating success of 100% renewable energy town

Posted on August 16, 2022 by dishanth

The small town of Onslow, Western Australia, is now powered almost entirely by renewable energy, and the utility behind that project wants to roll out the same tech across the state.

State-owned utility company Horizon Power said today that it will deploy distributed energy management system (DERMS) technology that helps coordinate the use of different resources like rooftop solar PV, battery storage and electric vehicles (EVs).

In the demonstration project at Onslow, the entire town ran on renewable energy and battery storage for a period of about an hour-and-a-half last year, thanks to a microgrid system which allowed it to operate as a self-contained electricity grid.

While that means Onslow still relies on natural gas engines and diesel generators, that reliance is greatly reduced, and the energy minister for Western Australia, Bill Johnson called the demonstration a “landmark step towards building a cleaner, brighter, renewable energy future for our state”.

The project showed that distributed energy resources (DERs) could be safely integrated at grid level, and Johnson, along with Horizon Power and software and controls providers PXiSE and SwitchDin, talked up the potential for it to be replicated widely.

Horizon Power said today that the technology enabled four times as much rooftop solar to be installed and integrated into the grid at Onslow, a town where more than 40% of homes have PV.

The DERMS works using predictive analytics to enable maximised penetration of renewable energy on the grid – predicting weather patterns, electricity consumer behaviour and so on – while also ensuring stability and security of electricity supply to homes and businesses.

It enables not just DERs but also centralised resources like large-scale solar PV and batteries as well as thermal power stations to act in concert together to meet local energy needs.

Horizon will introduce the technology into remote and regional parts of the state. The company’s general manager for technology and digital transformation said that around 60% of Horizon Power’s energy systems are already dealing with limits on rooftop solar.

The DERMS will “increase solar access for our customers, lower their energy bills, and help reduce emissions,” Ray Achemedei said.

The rollout begins in the coastal resort town of Broome early next year and the utility will progressively deploy the tech across all of its power systems by the middle of 2024.

“This is the technology that will underpin the transition to 100% renewable towns,” Achemedei said, noting that the paradigm shift from centralised fossil fuel generation sending power in one direction only to decentralised and decarbonised energy which is bi-directional or multi-directional in flowing around the grid presents challenges that Horizon Power is tackling head on.

Other initiatives from the utility include a tender for distributed microgrids for rural areas launched in October 2021.

Then in November last year, Horizon began Energy Storage in Regional Towns, a AU$31 million programme to equip nine remote towns in Western Australia with shared community battery storage.

That programme is funded by the state government and is adding about 9MWh of battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity to local energy networks. Western Australia’s government put battery storage and solar PV at the heart of its post-pandemic economic recovery plans, announced in June 2021.

Source Energy Storage News