Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written By: Natalya Makarochkina, Senior Vice President, Secure Power Division, Schneider Electric

In achieving the energy mix to meet sustainability goals, energy storage in various forms, will play an increasingly important role.

The disruption of recent times has once again put a focus on the ability of businesses to adapt to change and be resilient. This is being applied to all business aspects, including supply chains. However, the same principles are drilling further down and into the fundamentals, namely power.

As the effects of climate change are being increasingly felt, and emission reduction deadlines approach, to a backdrop of outages and constrained power supply, power resilience and energy storage have been shown to be vital in ensuring that renewable energy sources (RES) can be integrated into national grids and made suitable to power the digital economy in Malaysia.

The application of digital technologies to energy, in the form of Electricity 4.0, has the potential to support growth and sustainability while ensuring resilience. In the same manner as Industry 4.0 is seeing the digitalisation of industry, Electricity 4.0 is the similar digitalisation of electricity generation and distribution.

Renewable Progress

Since implementing the Five Fuel Diversification Policy in 2000, Malaysia has expanded its renewable energy sources, including solar and small hydropower, into its energy mix. The 2010 National Renewable Energy Policy further accelerated this shift by setting a goal of 20% renewable energy by 2025 — a target that was surpassed in March 2023 with a 25% share, largely driven by solar energy, which benefits from Malaysia’s equatorial location and abundant sunlight.

Notably, Malaysia has taken significant steps toward sustainability with the launch of the National Energy Transition Roadmap (NETR). This ambitious initiative aims to transform the country’s energy landscape by emphasising the integration of renewable energy sources. With targets of achieving 31% renewable energy by 2025, 40% by 2035, and an ambitious 70% by 2050, Malaysia demonstrates its commitment to embracing cleaner energy alternatives.

While this is welcome news for emission reduction and energy availability, it also brings with it major challenges. RES generation is characterised by variability due to the fluctuating intensity of the sun and wind, which impacts generative power. To effectively address this and enable the integration of intermittent renewable energy, grid-scale energy storage is a critical component of the required infrastructure. By implementing grid-scale energy storage solutions, it becomes possible to support the development of resilient grids capable of accommodating 70% or more RES, as demonstrated by MIT research.

Long Duration Energy Storage

Long-duration energy storage (LDES) is a major technical challenge, where requirements could be for hours, days, weeks, or even months. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is the most widely used storage technology and holds considerable untapped potential in several regions. However, batteries remain the most scalable type of grid-scale energy storage due to their packaging, modular deployment, and easy availability, and the market has seen strong growth in recent years according to the IEA. Other energy storage technologies include compressed air and gravity storage, but they play a comparatively small role in current power systems.

Additionally, the emerging technology of hydrogen, according to the IEA holds promise for the seasonal storage of renewable energy.

Along with the established methods for LDES, there are also novel technologies emerging such as what are termed flow batteries. Flow batteries employ a liquid electrolyte to store the electrical charge, with it being pumped through electrodes to extract the electrons. This breakthrough is seen as a major boon for RES dominated energy grids as it is scalable and more readily adaptable to the variability of wind and solar generation.

A study conducted by McKinsey Sustainability projects that by 2040, LDES could potentially deploy between 1.5 and 2.5 terawatts (TW) of power capacity globally, which represents eight to 15 times the total energy-storage capacity deployed currently. There is potential for 85 to 140 terawatt-hours (TWh) of energy capacity by 2040 and energy storage up to 10 percent of all electricity consumed.

Microgrid Support

This LDES capability would work in conjunction with micro-grid design for large energy users, such as manufacturing and heavy industry, or data centres. Any facility or sector that has a large critical power estate can take advantage of new technologies to allow for large deployments of batteries, such as lithium-ion batteries in intelligent uninterruptable power systems (UPS), to be part of the storage capacity necessary to facilitate greater RES adoption.

Although not providing LDES, microgrids offer short-term storage capacity that can help in terms of smoothing peak grid usage, leveraging technologies such as intelligent UPS estates, as well as with the overall variability concerns. This is seen as a benefit where proximity to the RES generation may be an issue, and for more rural deployments.

These combined capabilities also provide resilience for the energy supply, ensuring that even when entire generation sites are offline for any reason, whether due to atmospheric conditions or disruption, power can flow and meet immediate needs until other measures can be brought to bear.

Broader Facilities

As many nations move towards implementing smart national grids to meet future needs, microgrids are seen as a significant factor. Through new management and orchestration systems, large energy users can be rewarded for their storage and resupply capabilities, as well as demand-side management to support peak usage across the grid.

“The disruption of recent times has once again put a focus on the ability of businesses to adapt to change and be resilient. This is being applied to all business aspects, including supply chains. However, the same principles are drilling further down and into the fundamentals, namely power.”

The ability to quickly implement such measures through economies of scale, reference designs and vendors’ relentless pursuit of efficiency, combined with facilities such as product environmental profiles (PEP), means that organisations can confidently build out capacity while supporting wider efforts to decarbonise and support Malaysia’s transition towards low carbon future.

A PEP is a specific type of quantitative Type III Environmental Declaration, as defined by ISO 14025. It offers a high degree of reliability and transparency by drawing upon a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) of a product. This assessment takes into account various environmental impacts, including energy consumption, carbon footprint, raw material usage, as well as air, water, and soil pollution.

Schneider Electric offers a range of solutions in this area, including many variations on solar, to further provide options for many scenarios.

Digital Innovation in Power

Schneider Electric is contributing to these efforts through the concept of Electricity 4.0. The digitalisation of energy is a key factor ensuring the benefits of digital technologies can support smart grids, microgrid integration, RES adoption, and the path to net zero.

Digital innovation brings greater visibility in energy generation and distribution, eliminating waste and driving efficiency. Digital technology such as metering and monitoring enables everyone to see how they are using our energy. In addition, smart devices, apps, analytics, and software go a step further and enable us to deploy smart energy more efficiently, meaning we can address a huge amount of untapped potential for energy savings.

Providing businesses and service providers with the solutions and services to fully orchestrate digital energy management means that everyone can plug in and contribute to a more renewable-powered, sustainable energy future.

Part of the Solution

Renewable energy sources are likely to form a significant proportion of energy generation in the future, as part of a solution to achieve a decarbonised, net zero goal. Grid-scale energy storage and the resilience that it provides, will be critical in facilitating those renewable energy sources in the digitalised smart grids of the future.

Large energy consumers, leveraging digitalised energy systems can be a part of that solution, supporting change, increasing transparency, and underpinning the development of digital economies that are sustainable and accessible to all.

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