Energy storage in Mexico: fertile ground for technological development and investment

One of the stand-out takeaways from the recent Intersolar Mexico 2024 trade show was the vital importance of integrating energy storage into the national energy mix.

President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo has already announced a national energy plan focused on driving renewables investment, expanding electromobility, and modernizing ageing grid infrastructure with the aim of Mexico generating 54% of its electricity from renewables, up from 12.1% today.

The new administration will also urgently need a regulatory framework that provides certainty to energy storage investors and the Energy Regulatory Commission is consulting on that topic, with the results of the exercise expected during 2024. The resulting regulation must address the involvement of private companies in the energy mix, particularly with regard to recognizing the grid services energy storage can offer.

To integrate energy storage effectively into the Mexican energy mix, industry must lead the way in promoting links between academia, itself, government, and wider society to promote viable, scalable solutions.

The rewards would be huge as it has been estimated Mexico will require 2.3 GW of new energy storage projects through 2034, to avoid grid distortion. A plan concerning the installation and retirement of power plants, prepared as part of the National Electric System’s development program, projected Mexico could install 4.5 GW of energy storage sites between 2022 and 2036.

Mexico is playing catch-up, with the world having installed around 10 GW of non-pumped-hydro energy storage sites by 2020, according to the United States Department of Energy.

Work is underway, however, with a workshop held in 2019 by the National Institute of Electricity and Clean Energy, the Ministry of Energy, and the National Council of Humanities, Science and Technology having identified the need to include energy storage in Mexico’s electricity market rules and in the planning of electricity transmission and distribution networks. The need for regulations concerning the testing, certification, and interconnection of energy storage facilities was also highlighted.

The Mexican Energy Storage Network has been holding free monthly seminars, available through its Facebook page, since its foundation in 2017.

The Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) has co-ordinated the biennial Energy Storage Discussions research conference in Mexico since 2014, with the next event due at the Centro de Nanociencias y Nanotecnología of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (CNYN-UNAM) in Ensenada in November 2025.

Around 20 university research groups were exploring energy storage by 2023 and have achieved notable advances in areas including high-speed and high-capacity batteries; the use of abundant, low-cost materials; and alternative or complementary devices such as supercapacitors.

With a need to continue to research new energy storage technology and to develop quality standards to take account of battery fire risk and to draft reuse and recycling guidelines, there is much to do.

This article was prepared with the help of research carried out by Enrique Quiroga-González and Ana Karina Cuentas-Gallegos, of the Mexican Energy Storage Network. Quiroga-González is a researcher at the Institute of Physics at BUAP, and Cuentas-Gallegos belongs to the faculty of researchers at CNYN-UNAM.

From pv magazine Mexico.