Energy Storage Is Essential for the Energy Transition

Climate change can be tackled using renewable energies, but the most important challenge for the industry is how to store that energy for when renewable resources such as wind and solar are not producing. Storage would be the key to solve the intermittency that fossil fuels do not suffer from, but which appears as a weakness of some of the most popularly used sources of renewable energy.

Experts believe that storage will revolutionize the advancement of solar energy on various scales, accelerating the renewable energy transition in Mexico, a country with the fifth-highest solar irradiation in the world. The fusion of photovoltaic energy with storage technologies will create “prosumers” who produce, consume and store their own energy, accumulating energy savings and providing stability for the national grid.

According to Solar Power Mexico, energy storage can provide a wide range of services throughout the energy value chain, such as increasing the reliability, flexibility and operability of the transmission and distribution network. This reliability comes from eliminating the problem of intermittency by mitigating of sudden fluctuations in energy supply and demand.

Developing renewable energy storage would also impact Mexico’s energy supply positively, as it can be delivered effectively without the costs, inefficiencies, and pollution generated by fossil fuel plants.

Storage also generates multiple value streams through its participation in short-term and real-time energy markets. It is a technology withgreat potential to support the energy transition and comply with the Paris Agreements, since it does not generate direct emissions. It is also a crucial technology to provide electricity access to people in remote rural areas.

Mexico has huge solar potential. Eighty-five percent of its territory is located along the solar belt, which receives an annual daily solar irradiation between 4.4KWh/m² and 6.3KWh/m². With this potential, Mexico can generate twice as much PV solar energy with the same installed capacity as countries such as Germany can do. Due to the low costs of solar and wind energy in Mexico, storage systems represent a key opportunity to meet the growing energy demand without a proportional growth in electricity prices, while meeting environmental goals the government has committed to. The decarbonization of the electricity sector is widely considered to be an unstoppable trend worldwide. Energy storage will be a strategic pillar for Mexico in its quest to the energy transition.