Under the proposed Kraftwerkssicherheitsgesetz, loosely translated as the Power Plant Safety Act, the Ministry for the Economy and Climate Change (BMWK) would seek resources, including 12.5GW of new power plants and 500MW of LDES.
The consultation was opened for six weeks from the 11 September announcement and follows the European Commission approving the plan''s rollout and the German Federal government coming to an agreement in early July.
The strategy will see procurements of a combination of so-called ''hydrogen-ready'' gas power plants, a handful of power plants running on hydrogen from their start of operation, as well as a fleet of gas plants and the LDES technologies. BMWK’s tender plan documents can be found here (PDF, in German).
The 500MW LDES procurement will take place as part of a first tranche, alongside 5GW of hydrogen-ready power plants, 2GW of modernisations to make existing plants run on hydrogen, and 500MW of pure hydrogen plants.
BDEW, Germany''s biggest trade association for the energy and water industries, welcomed the opening of the consultation and the drawing up of the draft law by BMWK.
"We must make rapid progress here so that the tendering process and thus the concrete realisation of H2-ready and H2-sprinter power plants and long-term storage facilities can finally begin," BDEW executive board chair Kerstin Andreae said.
Companies need "a reliable investment framework," Andreae said, adding that the planned integration of the Power Plant Safety Law with the new capacity market mechanism from 2028, "is an absolutely necessary building block for investment security."
Lars Stephan, policy and markets director at Fluence noted in a LinkedIn post last week that BMWK is planning to require LDES technologies to provide up to 72-hour discharge duration with a minimum 1MW power rating.
The government said it is looking for resources to plug gaps in variable solar PV and wind energy generation, including the infamous ''dunkelflaute'' periods when low sunlight and low wind could persist over days at a time.
As mentioned by Lars Stephan''s post, the German government’s definition of ''long-duration'' goes way further than the more typical 8-hour duration commonly associated with the term. The 8-hour discharge threshold has been adopted by governments in the UK, Italy, Ireland and California as each has also moved to begin their first procurements for LDES.
Developers will receive a government contribution to Capex costs, paid across 10 annual installations, with bids awarded on a lowest cost of storage per MW/MWh basis, Stephan said.
The energy storage system integrator''s European policy and markets director added that the door could be open for much more LDES in the proposed second tranche of Power Plant Safety Act procurements.
While the 5GW was originally earmarked to be awarded to gas plants, BMWK has been directed to include a technology-neutral approach. The current draft law design requires 96 consecutive hours of energy at a minimum power rating of 10MW.
Additionally, "the plants have to provide a bunch of advanced applications, including during zero active power, hence gas plants need a phase-shifter mode, batteries grid-forming inverters," Stephan wrote.
Lars Stephan and Julian Jansen, Fluence''s EMEA growth and market development director, co-authored an article on European electricity market design and why it must value the flexibility energy storage can bring to the grid. The full article has been included in the latest edition of PV Tech Power (Vol.40), available to ESN Premium subscribers.
The storage of intermittent renewable power has been called "energy''s next big thing," the "holy grail," and the "missing link" of the energy transition. In Energiewende home country Germany, where the share of green power already tops one third of consumption, hardly a week goes by without media reports on innovative storage projects.
Especially batteries have basked in the limelight of recent public attention. Fuelled by massive price drops, the technology has begun to spread fast: The country commissioned its 100,000th home solar battery in late summer 2018. The rising number of electric cars means an even larger wave of battery storage is rolling towards Germany and many other countries.
The boom of batteries and many other storage technologies will have a profound impact on Germany''s energy transition – the shift from fossil and nuclear power to a low-carbon economy. It will upend many existing business models in the energy world and beyond, and has triggered concerns about the availability of raw materials and the consequences of their procurement for people and the environment.
"The boom of storage in general and batteries in particular is not a surprise, but rather a logical consequence of the current phase of the energy transition," explains Valeska Gottke, head of the market division at German energy storage association BVES. "The share of renewables keeps rising and requires a profound transformation from a strongly centralised energy system towards a decentralised, flexible and renewable system. Storage is a valuable option to provide the flexibility required for this shift."
But the storage revolution''s impact on the energy transition might go further still, by becoming a key factor in the country''s coal exit. The government hopes to secure jobs in mining regions – a central obstacle in ongoing talks on how to phase out the CO2-intensive fuel – by attracting battery cell gigafactories or other storage projects to mining areas. Policymakers are also aiming to translate Germany''s lead in storage technologies into an export success in the global shift to a low-carbon future.
Storage will become key in the next phase of the energy transition. This will involve both a further increase of decentralised renewable power generation and the use of green electricity to decarbonise transport (electric vehicles), industry (replacing fossil-intensive processes), and buildings (heating with low-carbon energy sources) – a process referred to as sector coupling.
"This brings the role of electricity storage, and in particular battery systems, to centre stage," argues Adnan Amin, head of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). "Storage – from the batteries in solar home systems to those in electric vehicles – will be crucial to accelerating renewable energy deployment."
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