Electricity storage : need for a particular EU policy to facilitate its deployment and operation

To meet EU climate and energy policy objectives, the energy sector must undergo substantial structural changes in the coming decades. Various challenges will originate from both supply and demand side, including an increase in variability and intermittency of generation, or the proliferation of distributed energy/power resources like distributed generation, controllable demand and electric vehicles. Some stakeholders claim today that larger variability and intermittency of supply must inevitably go with a significant development of electricity storage. But storage technologies are only one possible type of means – amongst others like flexible generation and demand side management – to provide various services to the system. To face up with the challenges of the future power system, hence, a comprehensive approach to assess how to enable the development and deployment of electricity storage (and in the broader sense also of other flexibility means) has to be developed. We analyze whether the benefits that storage can provide are already recognized and valorized by the existing market design and regulation. First, we discuss whether electricity storage is a special class of assets for the future power system that should be supported by some particular market design or regulation. Second, we identify viable business models and, finally, discuss whether current market rule setting and regulation allow for these business models.