European Union (EU) reforms of electricity market design should recognise the value of flexibility options like energy storage, according to representatives of Fluence.
The EU yesterday opened a public consultation into its planned reformation, aimed at addressing vulnerabilities laid bare by last year’s energy crisis and the resulting soaring cost of consumer bills.
The reform process will also support the Union’s key energy and climate policies, including REPowerEU, its plan to increase energy independence from Russian fossil fuels and the European Green Deal, the package to support transition to a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions-free economy by 2050.
“The EU’s electricity market has served us well for over 20 years. But the unprecedented energy crisis we are facing shows that we need to make the electricity market design fit for the future, allowing it to deliver the benefits of affordable clean energy to everyone,” Kadri Simson, EU commissioner for energy said.
In a recent technical paper contributed to our publisher Solar Media’s quarterly journal PV Tech Power (Vol.33), Fluence’s Julian Jansen and Lars Stephan wrote that the reforms must value flexibility from technologies such as energy storage and demand response as a “critical enabler of the energy transition”.
“European policy makers need to strengthen the role of flexibility technologies, including energy storage, in future Energy Market Design,” the pair wrote.
Jansen is growth and market development director and Stephan policy and market development director in the EMEA region for Fluence, a system integrator, manufacturer and provider of technologies for energy storage and energy trading and management services for renewables and storage.
The European energy crisis is not simply the result of gas shortages, but also of persistent heat waves which reduced the amount of water available for cooling conventional power plants and for generation from hydroelectric resources.