RAPIDLY evolving battery electric storage systems (BESS) have added another dimension to the energy mix, giving added value to renewable sources like solar and allowing businesses to be even more creative in developing power solutions that suit their specific conditions and budgets.
“The falling cost of solar energy infrastructure in South Africa has helped to make renewables an essential part of local businesses’ response to load shedding and the steep rise in electricity costs,” said Andrew van Zyl, MD of SRK Consulting (South Africa). “BESS now adds another valuable dimension to the flexibility of hybrid energy solutions being developed.”
He pointed out that a growing number of businesses today are employing a combination of energy generation sources – including grid power, diesel generators and photovoltaic systems. Battery storage now adds the possibility of fine-tuning a hybrid solution to use less of the more expensive or carbon-intensive modes of energy generation.
“Taking into account their respective needs for baseload energy, businesses can now tweak their hybrid systems to better suit their applications,” he explained. “In many cases, a user can employ BESS to start overcoming the intermittency of renewable sources like solar – while retaining other baseload sources in the energy mix.”
BESS uptake in the US between 2020 and 2024 has been over 1 000% – rising from 2,4 GW in 2020 to 27 GW in 2024. Projections from S&P Capital IQ suggest that installed capacity of BESS in the US is expected to exceed 170GW
by 2030.
There are similar trends in Europe, driven by the growing use of wind and solar power in countries like the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. Here, the proportion of intermittent renewable electricity sources in the installed capacity mix has increased from 25-40% in 2015 to 50-60% in 2024, and is expected to reach up to 80% by 2030.
“A key advantage of solar and battery solutions is that they can be added incrementally as a company’s budget allows,” said Van Zyl. “This makes them highly accessible technologies that progressively build up a business’s energy resilience, cost-efficiency and sustainability.”
According to Philippa Burmeister, partner and principal environmental scientist at SRK Consulting (SA), business’s proactive embrace of solar energy has – over just five years – been the equivalent of gifting the country another power station.
“Rooftop photovoltaic installations around the country have added about 5,5 GW of energy generating capacity over the past five years or so,” said Burmeister.
“This solar capacity is equivalent to one new coal-fired power station; it was added in about one third of the time it would have taken to complete such a power station – and at no cost to Eskom or the government, beyond the tax incentives offered in 2023.”
She noted that this demonstrates the potential of solar and BESS, highlighting that – as BESS becomes steadily more affordable – the growing levels of solar energy being generated can be more usefully employed across the production cycle in many industrial sectors at even lower costs.
