Italy at the forefront not only on renewables, but also on energy storage. Thanks to Terna's Storage Lab – whose project and state of the art was illustrated at the Milan Polytechnic – that is the largest battery system, by installed capacity, at European level. “Terna – said the chairman Catia Bastioli – is already capable of accumulating energy for 50 MW through its plants in Sardinia, Sicily and Campania, equipped with world-class technologies. And we will reach 75 MW”.
A very large amount (equal to or greater than the entire amount of energy from wind and photovoltaic power that Italy will be able to produce within a few years), which will help reorganize the electricity system in the manner that legislators and institutions international are setting for the future: less and less thermoelectric energy, with a view to decarbonisation also established with the COP21 agreements in Paris, and more and more renewable energies, which however are not programmable and for this reason the storage will allow not only not to lose production capacity in the event of excess production, but also and above all to make transmission stable and safe in the event of lower production, avoiding voltage drops.
“Climate change is worrying – said Bastioli – e technology can be a solution but also part of the problem. So far it has been more part of the problem, the challenge is to insert technologies into strategic objectives for sustainability". The main European objectives are energy efficiency, almost entirely based on the electric vector, and precisely the production of energy from renewable sources, with the goal for 2030 to bring their incidence on final consumption to 27% and the reduction of greenhouse gases to -40%. “Italy – Luigi Michi, head of Terna's Strategy and Development Division explained to the audience at the Politecnico – is in line with these objectives: at the moment we are already at 17,5% of consumption, which was a target set for 2020 , and as a country alone we have reduced greenhouse gases by 13%, contributing to -20% at a European level”.
Among other things, 2017 was the year of the peak of energy production from renewable sources, especially in spring which, unlike what is thought, is more prolific than summer for photovoltaics: "At 3 in the afternoon on 21 May last – explained Michi – the demand covered by renewable sources hit the record 87%, that day the average was 60% and in May it was almost 40%. Numbers that give the idea of need to store energy, in order not to lose it since by law renewables have precedence and must be immediately introduced into the transmission grid. "The challenge in fact - said Bastioli - is to strengthen the electricity grid, maximizing interaction with renewable sources, but also to develop energy storage and new forms of flexibility, which allow real-time modulation of needs".
Any energy produced in excess can therefore be stored for the moments in which, since renewables cannot be programmed, there will be less energy and the need will increase. “As is happening more and more frequently – explains Michi -, given that thermoelectric production is constantly decreasing from a power of 77 MW in 2012 to 57 today and the 52 target for 2020, and that already in 2015 the progressive reduction of conventional generation capacity was combined with a peak demand linked to the exceptional heat". We were talking about the month of July, and the same happened this year according to the latest data released by Terna.
Thanks to the batteries, the system is made safer, where safe means homogeneous in the transmitted frequency, with less waste of energy and less risk on the growing needs of consumers. And obviously greener, given that in Italy in 2009 only 6 GW of wind and photovoltaic plants were installed, which became almost 30 GW in 2016, with a growth forecast of up to 50-60 GW in the coming years. The great protagonist of this change is the South, where most of the renewable energy is produced (with consumption, however, mostly in the Centre-North) and where this energy is mostly stored, given that the two main poles of the Storage Lab are those of Codrongianos in Sardinia and Ciminna in Sicily, which have a capacity of 8 MW each, plus other plants scattered above all in Campania.
