Building the grid required for the future

Today’s grid is fundamentally different to the one we inherited. Back in 2015, we were asking investors to invest in technology that hadn’t yet been proven at scale, in markets that barely existed, with revenue models that were theoretical at best. There were fewer than ten suppliers globally, and projects rarely exceeded 10 MW.

Now, as vast amounts of wind and solar flood the network, BESS has shored up the grid, expanded the UK’s use of renewable energy and reduced its reliance on fossil fuels. We’re now closing over £200 million green finance deals, and the sector has gone from chasing innovation grants to attracting serious institutional capital. Over a hundred suppliers now compete globally. Systems stack multiple revenue streams and projects regularly reach 100 MW or more. That shift happened because storage stopped being a speculative gamble and became infrastructure that grids simply cannot function without.

Yet what we’ve built so far is just the beginning. The demands ahead require us to think about storage in entirely new ways.

The scale of what’s coming

By 2050, the UK’s population will grow from 70 million to 80 million and annual energy consumption will nearly triple from 290 TWh to 800 TWh. To meet Paris Agreement targets, renewable capacity must expand five-fold, from 49 GW to 250 GW. And to make any of this work, storage capacity needs to climb from 10 GW today to 90 GW, a nine-fold increase.

This represents one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in modern history. We’re building an entirely different kind of system, moving away from a one-directional, centralised model toward one where energy flows in multiple directions simultaneously.

Investment patterns need to reflect this shift. Globally, spending on low-emissions power generation and batteries has more than doubled over the past decade, weathering the shockwaves of the Covid pandemic and the turmoil of the 2022 energy crisis. A decade ago, investments in fossil fuels were 30% higher than those in electricity generation, grids and storage. That equation has fundamentally changed as we enter what many are calling a new “Age of Electricity”.

However, whilst investment in generation has accelerated, spending on grids and storage infrastructure needs to increase further. Maintaining energy security amid rising demand requires moving grid investment toward parity with the amount spent on energy generation. Storage sits at the intersection of both and represents one of the most effective uses of capital in bridging that gap.

Beyond today’s applications

For the past decade, the BESS business model has largely centred on energy arbitrage and frequency response. Charge when prices are low, discharge when they’re high. Respond to grid frequency deviations in milliseconds. These applications proved the technology and established the market but will inevitably need to progress further to meet the evolving demands of the grid of tomorrow.

You cannot run a grid on 80% renewable penetration with storage that only does energy arbitrage. The physics won’t allow it. As synchronous generators retire, batteries must provide synthetic inertia to maintain grid stability. They need to deliver short-circuit contribution to maintain fault levels across transmission networks. They must manage voltage control as generation becomes more distributed and variable.

Ultimately, this is a fundamental shift in how we design and deploy storage. Early BESS projects were built around one or two revenue streams. Future systems need to be multipurpose grid assets from day one, capable of switching between different services as conditions demand.

The future grid

In this new paradigm, instead of simply consuming energy, organisations can actively shape when and how they use it. We’re already seeing the early stages of this transformation with micro grids. These co-located installations combine on-site generation, typically solar or wind, with data centres and battery storage to guarantee reliable supply regardless of what’s happening on the main grid.

We’ll begin to see these micro-pockets emerge across the country. Commercial properties that can island from the grid during outages or peak pricing periods, and behind-the-meter deployments will similarly accelerate over the next decade.

Having delivered over 4 GWs of clean power across the globe since I entered the BESS sector in 2015, I’ve witnessed firsthand how quickly this industry can move when the fundamentals align. At Pulse Clean Energy, we’re now deploying BESS that would have been considered almost impossible a decade ago, both in scale and capability.

Whilst we’re still a distance from the Paris targets, the harder lesson of the next decade will be whether we can cut through the regulatory complexity and deploy at the speed the moment demands.