President of the Energy Regulatory Office publishes a report on energy storage in Poland

The storage of electricity in warehouses with a total installed capacity of more than 10 MW from 3 July 2021 is a regulated activity and requires a licence from the President of the ERO.

Storage facilities integrated into the grid of electricity system operators allow for the reduction of the duration of power outages, are expected to improve the quality parameters of the supplied energy, and have a positive impact on the cooperation of the distribution grid with local renewable energy sources.

In 2023, the law was amended by the Act amending the Act on special solutions for certain heat sources in connection with the situation on the fuel market and certain other acts, according to which an electricity system operator may not own, build, operate or manage an energy storage facility. However, the legislation indicates the prerequisites that must be met in order for an electricity system operator, after obtaining a decision from the President of the ERO recognising an energy storage facility as a fully integrated component of the grid, to own, build, manage or operate the storage facility to which the decision applies.

Since the date of entry into force of the provisions under which the above-mentioned regulations were introduced into the Energy Law, i.e. between 28 February 2023 and May 2024, ERO has received applications from six distribution system operators for decisions recognising a total of 41 energy storage facilities as fully integrated network elements and agreeing that the electricity system operator should own, build, manage or operate them.

By 10 May this year. The ERO President had issued five decisions recognising the DSOs' energy storage facilities as fully integrated network elements and one refusal decision. The remaining applications are pending.

Storage facilities in the registers of grid operators

With the aforementioned 2021 Act, electricity system operators were obliged to maintain electronic registers of electricity storages connected to their network, forming part of their network or being part of a generating unit or end-user installation connected to their network. Energy storage facilities with a total installed capacity of more than 50 kW, but not exceeding 10 MW of capacity, are subject to entry in such a register.

Monitoring carried out by the President of the ERO shows that energy storage facilities were indicated in the registers of the five largest DSOs and the TSO. They included 12 energy storage facilities with a total installed capacity of 1 464.5 MW.

The largest storages in terms of installed capacity are pumped storage plants, whose total installed capacity accounted for 85 per cent of the total capacity of registered storages. Half of the storages, however, use lithium-ion battery technology.

Energy storage in the power market

Recently, storage installations have played an increasingly important role in the power market. Their share in the 2028 main auction amounted to 15 per cent of contracted capacity, compared to less than 7 per cent in previous years.

As a result of the main capacity market auctions for 2021-2028 and the supplementary auctions for 2012-2025, contracts were concluded for energy storages with a total capacity of 9.5 GW, of which 7.1 GW are for existing units, 0.5 GW for retrofitted units and 1.9 GW for new units that will be built as a result of contracts concluded with the market operator.

All existing and retrofitted electricity storage participating in the 2021-2026 main auctions and supplementary auctions are pumped storage plants (including those with natural inflow) that were operating under a generation licence from the President of the ERO before 2021. The new units that will appear as a result of the main auctions for 2027-2028, on the other hand, are energy storage units made with electrochemical battery technology.

Source: URE