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The majority of utility companies across the world are planning to invest in energy storage and expect to see a return on that investment in the next 10 years, research by Accenture has found.
A survey of 85 industry executives from 18 countries has revealed 77 per cent are already investing or planning to invest in energy storage solutions in the next 10 years.
Almost half of those surveyed also said they expect moderate or significant revenue upside from investing in storage by 2030.
Accenture said it expects network companies to learn from their experience of the uptake in domestic solar PV to “get into the game early”.
Accenture smart grid services’ global managing director Stephanie Jamison said: “We see utilities learning from their experience with PV, where they faced rapid growth in residential deployment without sufficient means to manage the effective integration of the new supply, and lagged in developing complementary services, like installation, maintenance and dispatch optimisation, leaving the doors open to new competition.”
In the next five years 49 per cent expect to be offering network-level storage services, and 30 per cent customer residential storage services such as maintenance.
But Accenture has warned to capitalise on the benefits of storage utilities need to transform the role of the distribution business, yet only 15 per cent of those asked worldwide, and 29 per cent of those in Europe, say this transformation is already underway.
Tighter collaboration with policymakers is needed to overcome one of the key “roadblocks” to this transformation, Accenture said.
“We expect a fundamental shift of the market structure, which will include greater use of competitive markets, but utilities and distribution businesses need to push the boundaries, collaborate with regulators to innovate, and strategically invest in solutions that will support a more digital and distributed grid, providing new choices and value streams for customers,” said Jamison.
The government yesterday confirmed in the budget it will allocate at least £50 million to help innovation in energy storage, demand-side response (DSR) and other smart technologies over the next five years.
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