Framework ‘in place’ for battery storage

LAST YEAR, BARBADOS spent almost one billion dollars in fuel imports and as the country continues towards its 2030 renewable energy goals, one of the key plants will be the introduction of battery storage and expansion of the electricity grid.

Senator Lisa Cummins, whose Ministry of Energy and Business Development was allocated $65 290 934 in the 2025 Estimates, the schedule to the Appropriation Bill, 2025, said the battery storage framework would soon be introduced.

She and her team were in the Well of the House of Assembly yesterday and said prior to the recently passed Electricity Supply Act, there was no provision for storage to be brought onto the grid in the way this Government proposes to do.

She said it should only carry 100 megawatts of power, and only for fossil fuels, but was since modified to allow for a blend, including solar photovoltaics (PV), which have their limitations, providing at best four hours peak during the daytime.

“We now have a framework guiding the technical specifications for batteries for the country that did not exist before; that has been completed,” Cummins said.

With the Ministry having conducted a grid characterisation study, Cummins said the first battery energy storage system projects would be on the transmission lines and the second phase would be on the distribution lines.

First system

The Minister said in a “matter of weeks” they would be preparing to launch Barbados’ first battery energy storage system procurement and we will have that in the market.

“The Fair Trading Commission (FTC) has also completed their public consultation on the launch of an energy storage tariff regime. That will allow for persons who want to have their own battery systems and who have solar PV to also make an application for battery energy for their own energy storage systems,” Cummins said.

“So there will be at least two pathways being implemented in parallel – large systems, smaller systems – so that Barbadians and the Barbadian community, business and residential customers, can have access to battery energy storage systems.”

Delano Scantlebury, project director in the Project Monitoring and Coordination Team, said the procurement was for 60 megawatts of battery energy storage systems. Since November last year, 69 entities downloaded the documents, but they received 39 projects with a capacity of 404 megawatts of battery storage from 11 companies and were in the final stages of the request for proposals.

Meanwhile, FTC director of utilities regulation, Brian Reece, said they were “now in the process of determining what will be the revised energy storage tariff for up to one megawatt to … allow for those smaller installations to take hold as well”.

Cummins told Minister of the Environment Adrian Forde if Barbados was able to save that billion dollars in foreign exchange from the fuel import bill by harnessing the energy from the sun and wind, it could be redirected to social services.

(SAT)

MINISTER OF ENERGY SENATOR Lisa Cummins

(front row, centre) and her team in the Well of Parliament yesterday. (GP)