Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Felloship

Title: Navigating energy storage challenges: profitability and net zero goals in Europe's energy transition

Funding body: EU HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01

Funding amount: € 172,000

Project duration: 24 months (start date 1st October 2024)

Principal Investigator: Dr Iacopo Savelli

Project overview

Large-scale energy storages (LES) are critical building blocks to support the massive deployment of intermittent renewable generation and the rapid phase-out of fossil-fuel generators required to achieve net zero by 2050. Yet, critical questions remain open, such as: 

1. Will this substantial investment in LES cannibalise its own market? 

2. How will these problems evolve from now to 2050 across Europe? 

This research project will answer these questions investigating: (i) the self-cannibalisation (i.e., how the increasing LES deployment can reduce profitability in its own market); (ii) the cross-cannibalisation (i.e., how the increasing renewable penetration will affect storage revenues); and (iii) how the trajectory of these two aspects will evolve from present days until 2050, in Europe. 

This project aims at:

• Developing a detailed and ready-to-use European transmission network model, which will be released open source on GitHub (D1);

• Assessing how the self- and cross-cannibalisation effects will evolve in Europe up to 2050 (D2);

• Proposing policy recommendations and new incentive schemes to support merchant storage investors that will be reported to the academic community in a conference paper (D3);

• Disseminating the obtained results to stackholders.

Deliverables

• D1: EU grid and generation dataset containinig both the EU reference grid and generation capacity for 2030, 2040 and 2050. Available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14779144.