13 December 2016
WindEurope CEO highlights falling costs of grid integration: “€5-13/MWh”
WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson plugged the falling costs of the integration of variable renewables at a G20 energy event in Munich. Responding to the German think-tank Agora Energiewende he noted that average system integration costs were now in a range of €5-13/MWh on top of LCOE, at least according to the Agora data. He highlighted how these costs would fall further with the declining costs of storage, greater penetration of demand response and an expanded roll-out of digital technologies to support e.g. the efficiency of wind farms and their integration in the energy system.
Agora Energiewende (Patrick Graichen) confirmed that the €5-13/MWh included the costs of market and grid balancing including demand response. It did not include the costs of storage. But countries didn’t “need to invest much in storage until renewables reached 50% of the power mix.” That was “at least 10 years off in most countries – by which time battery technology would be further developed and storage costs would be significantly lower than they are today.”
