Management and Valorization of Storage in Electrical Networks

Energy storage has become an essential part of the energy transition, particularly in view of the growing integration of renewable energies into power grids. Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power, while promising in terms of reducing carbon emissions, suffer from the intermittency of their production, creating major challenges for the stability and reliability of power systems. This intermittency leads to discrepancies between energy supply and demand, requiring flexible management solutions. Against this backdrop, energy storage technologies are proving to be the ideal solution for smoothing out production variations, stabilizing networks and ensuring a continuous, reliable supply of electricity, particularly during periods of low production or high demand.

Storage technologies make it possible to absorb surplus energy when it is produced in excess, store it in suitable systems and then release it at a later date to meet demand or provide auxiliary services such as frequency regulation and load balancing. By reducing the temporal gaps between energy production and consumption, and even geographical gaps in some decentralized systems, storage is becoming a strategic asset in the management of modern power grids.

This central role of energy storage is all the more crucial as its deployment diversifies. It can now be deployed at different scales, from centralized installations to decentralized systems and autonomous microgrids. These systems, both connected to the main electricity grid and off-grid, provide much-needed flexibility, but their potential is still often limited by regulatory and economic challenges. Indeed, current market conditions do not always allow the full range of services that these technologies can offer to be exploited. What's more, some storage solutions remain costly compared with alternatives such as flexible generation or the extension of energy transmission infrastructures.

Historically, energy storage has been seen primarily as a means of optimizing the use of dispatchable energy resources in the face of fluctuating demand. However, with the increasing decarbonization of energy systems, it is becoming an essential lever for improving overall efficiency, by enabling better exploitation of intermittent renewable energies. With this in mind, it is important to adopt a systemic approach to energy storage, making the most of the diversity of services it can offer, both in centralized power grids and in smaller-scale applications such as self-consumption.

As a result, the main drivers for increased use of energy storage include improved energy efficiency, support for the integration of variable renewable resources, the rise of self-consumption and decentralized energy production,...