A new national plan to regulate planning procedures and permitting for energy storage facilities looks likely to be adopted in Israel. Contact online >>
A new national plan to regulate planning procedures and permitting for energy storage facilities looks likely to be adopted in Israel.
Created through a sub-committee of the National Planning and Construction Council together with the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, the plan would enable the development of energy storage at solar PV plants, as well as for residential use.
It would also regulate the deployment of energy storage at vehicle fueling stations to help buffer the grid from spikes in demand when multiple electric vehicles (EVs) charge at once, the Ministry said in a statement last week (9 August).
While details of the master plan, TMA, appear to have not been disclosed, the strategy has been developed to support Israel in deploying sufficiency energy storage to integrate rising shares of renewable energy – mostly from solar – onto its grid.
A draft of the TMA was submitted for government approval earlier this year, around the same time the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure said it would also be promoting a programme to develop and construct four separate 200MW/800MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) assets in Israel''s northern Gilboa mountain region.
As mentioned in our coverage yesterday of Sungrow''s 127MWh BESS supply deal in Israel to EDF Renewables, Israel is targeting getting to 30% renewable energy on its grid by 2030. This is made more challenging than in some other countries due to its status as an ''energy island'', without interconnection to neighbours that would allow cross-border renewable energy imports.
The government has identified energy storage as an effective means to enable that trajectory. Studies from about three years ago from the national Electricity Authority (PUA), modelled a need for about 8GWh of storage, although more recent figures from the Israeli Green Energy Association put that at closer to a likely 10GWh of required storage.
While the government has played its part to date in stimulating demand for energy storage, most notably through a couple of rounds of tenders for solar PV capacity paired with 4-hour duration battery storage, adoption of the TMA national plan would enable a wider rollout.
TMA includes principles for planning storage facilities, the locations at which construction should be permitted, and instructions on how to assess environmental impact.
Dorit Hochner, Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure planning director, said the plan would set out the preferred locations for new energy storage, as well as recommendations on layout and construction characteristics, and would also make recommendations to remove barriers to deployment.
The responsible sub-committee recommended last week that the National Council for Planning approve the national plan.
An auction for solar-plus-storage held in Israel by the country’s Electricity Authority (PUA) awarded 609MW of solar PV alongside 2.4GWh of energy storage.
The tender process concluded shortly before the end of 2020, awarding distribution grid-connected solar capacity paired with four hour duration energy storage at a clearing price of 17.45 Shekel cents per kilowatt-hour (US$0.0544/kWh). A total of 55 bids were received, from 10 companies, totalling 870MW of solar capacity – of which 33 bids from sevencompanies were accepted, totalling 608.95MW of solar energy and more than 2,400MWh of storage.
The Green Energy Association of Israel sent Energy-Storage.news an English language press release (the PUA website has only listed in Hebrew thus far), noting that the PUA was able to carry on with the auction process despite disruption from the coronavirus pandemic. The auction followed a previous tender held in the summer months of 2020 for distribution-connected solar-plus-storage.
While the first tender saw 168MW of solar and 672MWh put Israel “on the map”, Michael Salomon, CEO at consultancy Clean Horizon told Energy-Storage.news today, the massive award in the more recent auction puts Israel on trajectory to surpass the 2GW / 8GWh of energy storage it needs by 2030 to support a goal of sourcing 30% of its electricity from renewabled by 2030, requiring the deployment of 12GW of solar.
In a webinar hosted last November by this site together with Clean Horizon, head of PUA’s regulatory department Yossi Sokoler said that the 8GWh figure was not a deployment target as such, but the amount of storage that PUA had modelled as being necessary to support the renewable energy target.
Winning projects will have to be built within two-and-a-half years and asset owners or developers will receive remuneration through government-backed power purchase agreements (PPAs). The Green Energy Association of Israel said that the energy storage capacity will allow solar projects to maximise the potential for generation despite limited available grid connection capacity.
The storage will also help solar be used to meet the evening peak demand times for electricity. While not yet being configured to provide grid services such as frequency regulation as has been the case in other countries, the Association said they will be expected to be able to do so in future.
“With an estimated need of 8GWh for the whole country by 2030, it is striking to see that Israel’s latest auction just brougt to market over 2.4GWh of storage – to be deployed with long-term PPAs in the next 1 to 3 years,” Clean Horizon’s Michael Salomon said.
The latest result, combined with the ongoing procurement for a 300MW solar-plus-storage project inthe Negev Desertnear the city of Dimonaand added to the results of the previous auction pushes the “total energy storage to be deployed in the country to about 3.3GWh in the coming years,” Salomon said.
“The results of the next auctions to be launched during 2021 will be quite interesting to watch,” Salomon said, adding that Israel “may very soon” reach its 8GWh requirement for 2030.
Watch the November Energy-Storage.news / Clean Horizon webinar 'Israel's electricity revolution', with PUA's Yossi Sokoler, Green Energy Association of Israel head Eitan Parnass and Clean Horizon CEO Michael Salomon on our Channel here.
In an effort to drive the country to deploying more energy storage, the Israeli Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure has announced four large-scale battery storage projects.
The government ministry – renamed from the Ministry of Energy in February to reflect a wider remit – said yesterday (2 May) that it is promoting a programme to construct the four sites in the northern Gilboa mountain range region.
The buildout will total 800MW/3,200MWh, comprising four facilities of 200MW, each with four hours'' storage duration.
Describing it as a "programme of great importance for the energy sector," the ministry said it represented a first step in planning large-scale energy storage facilities at strategic locations on the grid. Future projects will be built in stages according to the network''s needs, and will leverage different storage technologies.
Israel''s great need for energy storage, is like many other countries'', driven by a requirement to integrate growing shares of renewable energy on the grid. This is exacerbated by Israel''s status as an energy island, despite its small land mass being without interconnection to neighbouring countries and largely needing to be self-sufficient.
As regular readers of Energy-Storage.news will know, Israel''s policy goal of reaching 30% renewable energy by 2030 – roughly equivalent to about 12GW of solar PV, likely to be the go-to renewable energy source in an almost-always sunny part of the world – has been modelled by the national energy regulatory authority, PUA, to need around 2GW/8GWh of energy storage to effectively integrate.
Steps already taken by the country include tenders for large-scale and off-grid solar-plus-storage plants, with a 2020 competitive solicitation leading to awards of contracts for 777MW of solar PV with 3,072MWh of battery storage. A subsequent 2021 round awarded contracts to 609MW of PV and 2.4GWh of energy storage.
More recently, last month the PUA implemented a supplementary tariff for distributed solar PV plants paired with energy storage, aiming to subsidise customers that shift stored solar energy for self-consumption at night-time periods and mitigate grid demand for energy at those times.
The role the 800MW of government-initiated projects in Gilboa will play is somewhat similar, but on a much larger scale. Renewable energy generated in the nearby northern regions of the country will be stored in the battery energy storage system (BESS) facilities, transmitted to urban demand centres at times of peak demand.
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