Renewable energy communities and energy storage: A match made in heaven

Enlit Europe intern Femke Verkleij asked Lorena Skijlan, founder and chief executive of Nobilegroup, to help demystify the connection between renewable energy communities and energy storage.

Skijlan is an energy industry expert and has many years of experience in business development and process management, especially in the energy sector.

In what ways are you involved within energy storage?

At Nobilegroup, we are developing renewable energy communities and distributed energy systems. Integration of storage will make these systems even more efficient. We are integrating storage for the purposes of reaching higher self-sufficiency grades within the renewable energy community at the moment. 

What are the benefits of energy storage and why is it so important?

Since small-scale distributed systems are mostly based on PV, buffering produced energy enables the renewable energy community to consume locally-produced energy also during the night hours. From the consumer perspective, this is the main benefit at the moment.

From the perspective of a system operator, as we are, we clearly see the benefit of integrating community storage and in this way higher storage capacity, rather than rolling out small storage capacity by each consumer within the REC.

Is there a current problem that stops the progression of energy storage? If so, what?

Our experience showed that in the most cases, the profitability of integration storage is still not given. For that reason, any optimization of the system comes before integration of storage systems.

How can energy storage in Europe be improved? And what steps are needed to accomplish this?   

Rolling out of energy storage systems, in our opinion, needs to be coupled with the different market roles such as renewable energy communities, active user, as well as different goals and efficiencies of the distributed systems.

Which EU-funded projects would you choose as currently among the best when it comes to energy storage and why?

Integration of storage systems for the purposes of grid stabilization are in my opinion the most important and challenging ones.

Moreover, projects which integrate distributed energy systems and their role within the all-over energy distribution are addressing the future challenges of our electricity system. Therefore, an interaction of distributed energy systems, such as renewable energy communities, with the grid and therefore with the DSO are the most important and most interesting ones.

By doing so we will be able to integrate storage systems in an efficient and profitable way.