At last week’s Global Energy Storage Conference Plenary at the SNEC trade show in Shanghai, China, Yana Hryshko, Head of Global Solar Supply Chain at Wood Mackenzie, spoke about the very attractive potential of solar and battery storage to deliver baseload power in a wide range of markets around the world. Specifically, the team at Wood Mackenzie has modelled three scenarios for Ukraine, Ghana and the Netherlands. For each country two solar-plus-storage deployments were considered, one for 4-hour storage and the other for 12 hours, along with conventional energy deployments of combined cycle gas and coal.
Since Hryshko hails from Ukraine and Ukraine has shown remarkable resiliency in its energy infrastructure despite an almost ten-fold increase in Russian attacks this year compared to last year according to a recent report in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the country has largely kept its lights on by relying on PV-plus-storage microgrids to provide power for extended periods. As Hryshko points out, these microgrids can tap into existing transmission grid infrastructure, thereby reducing the capex required to build these microgrids.
For all three countries, Wood Mackenzie’s modelling assumes a consistent system architecture and set of specifications. The configuration includes a 300 MW solar-plus-storage plant with a dispatch capacity of 100 MW, available in both 4-hour and 12-hour storage durations, corresponding to energy capacities of 400 MWh and 1,200 MWh respectively.
The transmission setup is based on a 110 kV system featuring an 8 km single-circuit power line. Substation infrastructure consists of three generator step-up transformers (GSUs), each rated at 105 MVA. At the distribution level, the system is designed as an on/off grid configuration supported by grid-forming inverters.
For the conventional energy scenarios, renewable energy generation is replaced with 300 MW of combined-cycle gas-fired generation and 300 MW of coal-fired generation.
In the case of Ukraine, the ability to tap existing transmission infrastructure means lower microgrid capex. Investments are still required in limited new construction and the assets generating the electricity. Ghana, on the other hand, provides a very different scenario, where no existing grid infrastructure can be relied on. In the case of the Netherlands, the grid infrastructure basically resembles that of Ukraine with the caveat that it constitutes a “grid-constrained scenario” due to the high penetration of renewables in the Dutch grid. The solution is to site the PV and storage assets close to the demand.
In the Ukraine the deployment of solar-plus-storage has been a life saver. “Despite the full-scale war, Ukraine still installs at least 1 GW of solar every year, according to official numbers. Unofficially, no one really knows the total, because much of it is installed locally and completely off-grid,” Hryshko emphasized. “There are entire industrial parks and entire residential communities that have built their own solar power plants and storage systems and then gone off-grid.”
In a levelized cost of energy (LCOE) analysis covering the period from 2020 to 2060, hybrid PV with 4-hour storage drops from $62/MWh to just $32/MWh, a drop of about 50%, albeit over a very long 40-year period. But already now the LCOE of a hybrid solution, be it 4 or 12 hours, is far below the LCOE of conventional fuel solutions. The latter has an LCOE in the neighborhood of $150/MWh, far above the $50/MWh, or less, achieved by the two hybrid solutions. Hryshko reveals a similar gap in the LCOE analysis completed for Ghana and the Netherlands. For all three countries the gap grows over time, with 4- and 12-hour hybrid solutions costing a fraction of conventional microgrids by the middle of this century.
The key takeaway from the session is that 12-hour baseload solar-plus-storage is already competitive today in all three countries based on an LCOE analysis. This does not mean that solar-plus-storage microgrids cost the least to build. This is only the case in the Netherlands, where siting solar near the demand minimizes transmission costs, thereby keeping capex 40% lower than equivalent coal and gas plants. In Ukraine, 12-hour solar-plus-storage microgrids already have a capex lower than coal and only slightly higher than gas ($860,000/MW compared to $960,000/MW for coal and $720,000/MW for gas).
But as Hryshko points out, the Achilles’ heel of gas are the very long lead times to secure gas turbines: “The lead times for gas turbines to build new power plants are about 3 to 6 years. So this technology is … not the answer for the energy transition,” she stated.
In three very different scenarios the combination of solar-plus-storage prove their worth and can be mobilized very quickly to generate affordable and clean electricity, not to mention a very modular and resilient form of electricity.
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