Director of the Brazilian Association of Energy Storage Solutions also mentions the issue of distributed minigeneration
Adding generators to solar and wind farms can help solve power problems. curtailment and excess distributed mini and microgeneration that divide the electricity sector, said the executive director of Absae (Brazilian Association of Energy Storage Solutions), Fabio Monteiro Lima, in an interview with Poder360.
For the director, batteries could be integrated with solar and wind generators to store surplus energy that ends up being cut by the National Electric System Operator and would also allow renewable plants to take advantage of what would be wasted in the capacity market – a model that remunerates plants for their availability to generate energy when the system needs it.
According to the model proposed by the executive, energy stored during the day (when there is excess supply) can be made available to the grid at times of greatest demand, generally in the late afternoon at night, when the Difference Settlement Price is highest. This would allow solar and wind farms to have two sources of income and avoid waste.
Investment in storage by wind and solar plants still comes up against import taxes on equipment that reach 70%. Lima advocates the adoption of regulatory and market mechanisms to make energy storage financially attractive.
“What we need is to give the correct economic signal. Why haven’t these entrepreneurs who are suffering from curtailment yet invested in batteries? Because they have 70% taxation, because they haven’t yet reduced their use of the transmission network and because they haven’t been able to access a capacity market from these batteries. If we give these signals, wind and solar generators will invest in storage, contributing to reducing the curtailment problem”declared Lima.
The forced cuts in renewable energy generation, popularly known as constitute of the Brazilian electricity sector. Curtailment is the mandatory shutdown of renewable plants by the ONS, even when there is wind or sun. This is because the electrical system needs to balance generation and consumption in real time.
When the grid is unable to absorb all available energy, the ONS forces these enterprises, which are mainly concentrated in the Northeast, to reduce production. These cuts result in a waste of clean energy and million-dollar losses for the segment, which, more and more frequently, is forced to “to throw away” considerable part of production.
Watch Fabio Lima’s interview with Poder360 (32min5s):
CONSUMER PARTICIPATION
Another reform advocated by Lima is the adoption of hourly rates for consumers. Currently, most Brazilians pay a single price for energy, regardless of the time of day. With the hourly rate, you receive a more realistic price signal: energy is cheap at times of surplus (such as midday, with strong sun) and expensive at times of less availability, known as the night peak.
“Curtailment comes from a lack of adequate economic signal. The residential consumer does not have the signal to consume at spare times, to reduce their consumption at the peak. And the generator does not have enough signal to invest in new technologies to reduce its exposure to curtailment. This is the work we have to do now”says the director.
MINI AND MICROGENERATION
For the director of Absae, the introduction of batteries can also help solve problems of excess production associated with the Distributed Micro and Minigeneration sector, small-scale solar or wind generation systems installed in homes, businesses and industries.
Some agents in the electricity sector consider the expansion of this type of enterprise as a threat and one of the main causes of curtailment. The MMGD segment already has an installed capacity of 44 GW (gigawatts), equivalent to almost 20% of all energy generation capacity in the country. Increasing this supply, especially during times of low demand, can overload the national electrical system and lead to .
Lima, like representatives of the MMGD sector, defends incentives for consumers who own wind panels so that they include batteries to store this excess energy and avoid oversupply at times when the system does not need charging.
“With the correct economic signal, with an hourly rate, with a sign of participation in the capacity market, naturally the distributed generation investor or distributed generation user will adopt a battery in their own home, in their own consumer unit and, as a result, will stop dumping that energy into the grid at a time of least systemic interest”he states.
