There is increasing high-level interest in the potential for energy storage in the Middle East, with grid-connected systems forecast to reach 1.8GW in the region by 2025, according to I.H.S.
This interest, from the likes of government agencies and utilities – many of which are state-owned – comes primarily from the burgeoning interest in utility-scale PV plants, an energy asset class which the region has wholeheartedly embraced in recent years according to Julian Jansen, a UK-based senior analyst with the research company.
“We are seeing that total deployment, the overall installed base by 2025 in the Middle East region, is going to reach around 1.8GW of grid-connected energy storage,” Jansen said.
“With a lot of that growth, to caveat, it’s going to be seen more towards the end of the period. Up to then, it’s going to be quite a slow market to get going until about 2020. Then we’ll see some strong growth.”
The region is at present unquestionably a small market as far as energy storage and especially utility-scale advance battery energy storage is concerned. The majority of the Middle East’s installed base comes from just one project, a 108MW sodium-sulfur battery energy storage project for Abu Dhabi Electricity and Water Authority supplied by Japanese company NGK. While Jansen said it was hardly controversial to state that energy storage is in its infancy in the region, it was unlikely to remain the case long term. One developer with experience of the region, Sami Khoreibi, CEO of Enviromena, recently blogged for this site that energy storage will transform Middle East and Africa’s energy market over the next 10 years.
“What we see now is that interest is ramping up very significantly,” Jansen said.
The UAE, Saud Arabia and Qatar are among the region’s countries that have enjoyed progress in solar PV in very recent times, with all of them adding significant utility-scale projects. Meanwhile Jordan, another of those countries to see large-scale PV rollout underway, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a 20MW battery-based energy storage system with AES Corporation in 2015.
Recent Comments