Anil Srivastava, CEO of Leclanche, a leading player in the European battery market told an energy conference last week that the emergence of global energy storage is now a driving force in today’s energy markets.
“The industry is witnessing totally new thinking toward the financing of energy storage projects by investors who are now looking at storage as a new asset class offering multiple revenue streams with large terminal value.”
Srivastava, speaking at t the Bloomberg 2017 Future of Energy Global Summit held in New York City, last week, summarized an expert panel’s findings on financing and investment models for grid energy storage systems.
Srivastava added that the “fastest growth in energy storage was coming in the commercial and industrial sectors which are utilising storage applications innovatively to better manage renewables integration and energy efficiency.” He commented that investors were adopting financing structures that addressed scale concerns and performance guarantees.
In a two-year period where global storage projects increased by more than 200% from 244MW of storage projects commissioned in 2014 to 790MW in 2016, the number of third-party financed projects as opposed to owner-financed projects was relatively low during with most following traditional financing structures.
The trend was confirmed in recent infrastructure — the largest energy storage project in the U.S. with Southern California Edison (SCE) for a 300MWh, distributed fleet of battery storage projects at a cost of $200 million. This project will allow SCE to shed up to 50MW x 4 hours of peak load within its resource and grid-constrained West Los Angeles Basin service territory.