China’s electricity storage capacity is to rise to 14.5 GW by 2020. This expected increase in storage would be good news for reducing the curtailment of power production.
In several regions of China, grid extension lags behind when compared to the expansion of renewable capacity. This leads to high rates of curtailment. Some regions therefore lose up to 40 percent of their wind and solar infeed due to grid bottlenecks. Battery storage facilities, as well as pumped-hydro station might be able to provide a remedy and thus increase the utilization of renewable energy plants.
A report of the China Energy Storage Alliance sheds light onto the storage situation in China. Currently, the storage capacity (without pumped-hydro stations) amounts to 105 MW. The forecast for 2020 is based on data from contracts and orders of storage producers and excludes pumped-hydro, as Tina Zhang, director of the industry alliance explains.
However, concepts with storage facilities are rarely economically viable. Price formation that is more aligned with market-based mechanisms might support storage concepts and thus incentivize the utilization of batteries, Xu Honghua from Beijing Corona Science and Technology says. In addition, the production of battery storage systems increased three-fold in 2015. Last year China’s output of lithium-ion-batteries reached 15.7 GWh. The support of electric mobility by the Chinese government facilitated this strong growth.
Other projects that aim at reducing the volatility of renewable energies are Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant. The Chinese company Shenhua Group and US-based SolarReserve signed a Memorandum of Understanding and agreed on jointly developing solar thermal power plants with about 1 GW of capacity. During the coming five years China aims at installing 10 GW of these CSP plants.
