Energy storage utility scale in an international perspective – key player for the energy transition: a comparison between Italy and Spain

One of the current challenges of the energy transition is to facilitate the integration into the electricity grid and other energy networks of increasing shares of renewable energy sources that present discontinuous and non-programmable operating regimes. In this environment of generation intermittency, the deployment of both utility-scale and distributed energy storage systems is the answer. The Italian and Spanish governments have introduced their own strategies to fulfill this purpose. Italy with the PNIEC (Integrated Energy and Climate Plan) sets a target of 6 GW for the storage of public services and 4 GW for the distributed in 2030. Spain, as part of the same strategy to state level and in order to respond to the massive influx of sources of renewable origin, it plans to go from the current 8.3 GW to a storage capacity of around 20 GW in 2030 and 30 GW in 2050, having considered both large-scale storage and distributed storage.

In this workshop, the involvement of members of both clusters - companies and research centers - together with their interest groups and institutions aims to make a comparative analysis at an international level between the two European realities in terms of policies, technological approaches and business models for the large-scale deployment of energy storage.