For the most part, it will take some years for solar-plus-storage in the ASEAN region to become economically viable on a large scale, but panellists at the opening day of Solar and Off-Grid Renewables Southeast Asia event in Bangkok, have warned that investors who come on board quickest are going to gain a huge advantage.
The ‘ASEAN Storage Market Potential’ session saw panellists disagree strongly over whether solar-plus-storage had already become an economically viable solution, with some claiming it had already reached grid parity with conventional power generation.
Leandro Leviste, CEO, Solar Philippines, said there was a need for more “daring” developers to enter Southeast Asia and take risks to allow for solar and storage to take on coal-fired power through the unregulated market. This echoed comments back in October about how Leviste’s company had commissioned a large-scale solar project in the Philippines without receiving approval from the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), achieving a sub-6 US cents per unit tariff by taking merchant risk.
However, not all developers are able to take these risks from either a PV or solar-plus-storage perspective.
Edward Douglas, partner at Southeast Asia renewables-focused firm, Armstrong Asset management, said that putting together a commercial solution for PV and storage had been a challenge. He also noted that there is a lack of system integrators in the region and the storage technology providers were not interested in the smaller markets so far.
He added: “You’ve got this situation where, commercially, from a financing standpoint, the battery guys won’t want the work of the system integrator and vice versa.”
However, he also said the potential for solar-plus-storage is enormous, adding: “Investors aren’t waking up to it really yet; they are beginning to, but the execution of that idea or potential into real projects isn’t happening quickly enough and I think investors who manage to put their pieces in place quickest are going to gain a very significant advantage, because the cost curves like solar are moving much more quickly than most people anticipate.”
Patrick Jaeger, vice president of Conergy Group, a frontrunner in storage deployment, said there was still a lack of understanding of how storage and solar really work when connected to the grid. This was in spite of the large amount of theorising and risk modelling that has been undertaken already. Jaeger also said regulation is far behind the energy storage concepts and this “throws wrenches” into people’s economic models.
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