AlphaESS explores UK market with confidence and exhibited at Solar & Storage Live 2019

Solar & Storage Live 2018 opens its doors yesterday, with around 4,000 pre-registered visitors flocking to Birmingham's NEC. Here's why this year's event is not to be missed.

The event gathers industry professionals in the heart of London. The three-day event saw a wide range of topics discussed, debated, and disagreed upon, from regulatory issues to the Capacity Market to the rising demand for flexibility.

Over the last year we've had a lot of uncertainty around the energy storage Market. We've also seen lots of changes to the pricing available through the frequency response services. Because of this, we've seen business models evolving to take these changes into account.

We are seeing a move away from projects providing frequency services and more of a focus on energy trading, through the balancing mechanism and on the wholesale market. There is also a lot of interest in electric vehicle charging, led by Pivot Power, that are intended to support the increasing demand for electricity in this area

We're also now hearing about opportunities in the merchant power market. It's an interesting time as we're generally seeing a wider variety of business models; there's no fixed business model being used.

We've seen other markets begin with grid services in front-of-the-meter, followed by an increase in behind-the-meter projects, often at commercial and industrial customer premises.  All of the services that are available to front-of-the-meter (FTM) projects are available to behind-the meter-projects (BTM) and it comes down to the technology that allows these projects to access those services, either from aggregators or in-house platforms.

We're seeing developers of front-of-the-meter projects developing their own platforms in order to trade electricity and that will filter down to the smaller commercial and industrial (C&I) batteries as they begin to deploy more.

What we've seen is that generally with a commercial and industrial battery, the grid services make up one part of the business case and the model will also include arbitrage, triad avoidance (reducing peak demand for industrial users of electricity), and sometimes even back-up power. With a FTM project, the revenue streams are more fixed, especially if they're not associated with a generating asset and they'll need to have revenue streams coming from those external sources.

This year AlphaESS will be bring in the B3 and SMILE5 residential systems that are tailored to the demand of UK market as well as its C&I full power solutions.

New Generation 3kW residential PV energy storage system

STORION-SMILE5 Residential Energy Storage System

What has become abundantly clear is that the UK's battery storage sector has been adapting to market changes. There has been a shift away from long-term contracts providing specific services, and we are seeing a shift towards more flexible projects that are able to react to the situation at a specific time, opening up opportunities in trading electricity and responding to the market.

We are also starting to see a lot more co-location of technologies, increase in residential applications and small-scale generation as the benefits are better understood, indicating an evolution in the energy storage market. AlphaESS is bringing the full power range solutions to the exhibition this year and ready to embrace the changes with UK.