Carl Fritjofsson
2024-12-18
Kurrent: Making data as available and ubiquitous as electricity
Real-time access to high-quality, reliable, and context-rich data
Over the course of the coming decades our electricity supply will almost entirely shift to renewable sources like solar and wind. At the same time, our electricity demands will skyrocket driven by the electrification of heating buildings, driving vehicles etc, and the surge in demand from data centers powering generative AI (data center power requirements will double by 2030 according to Goldman Sachs). There is a piece of this clean energy jigsaw that is critical to making it work, but not always in the limelight: large scale battery storage.
We are already well on the path towards renewable energy generation. In the first half of 2024, wind and solar accounted for 30 percent of EU electricity generation (57% in Germany), surpassing fossil fuels for the first time. The key challenge for renewables is intermittency: the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn't always blow.
This is where Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) come in. They hold and store surplus power when it is not needed and can then flexibly feed it back into the grid during times of high demand. Electricity consumption and generation must be balanced at all times in a grid which is why the unpredictable energy flows from solar and wind are such a problem.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that the global installed capacity of battery storage will need to rise from less than 200 GW in 2023 to more than a terawatt by the end of the decade, and nearly 5TW by 2050. The overall market for BESS could reach between $120bn and $150bn by 2030, more than double its size today, according to McKinsey.
Grid-scale battery systems require significant capex investments and optimizers play an important role in maximizing the efficiency, performance and economic value of the system. Typically, however, battery owners enter long-term contracts with these battery traders, revenues are very volatile and there are few reliable performance benchmarks. On the other hand, those companies in need of energy storage - including utilities, power producers, and big power consumers like data centers - have difficulty in gaining access to battery storage. The current set-up is therefore inefficient both for owners and off-takers of energy storage.
This is where terralayr comes in. Their platform replaces the one-to-one relationship between BESS owner and optimizer and instead creates a flexible marketplace for energy storage connecting battery asset owners with customers such as renewable energy generators or data centers.
For the battery owners, this means that they can maximize their returns with access to the best deals every day, avoid locking in their entire asset with a single battery trader and get maximum transparency on the market value of storage.
Customers of energy storage gain all of the benefits that batteries offer without the large overhead of a physical asset.
terralayr’s approach has interesting parallels with the development of cloud computing. Prior to Cloud, businesses used to own all of the computing power they needed to run their applications or services on servers on site. Amazon revolutionized this, and created a multi-billion dollar market, by offering scalable, on-demand access to computing power, storage and services, freeing business up from having to operate physical servers. Similarly, terralayr is aggregating battery storage and making capacity easily available on demand via its cloud platform. Customers can rent storage capacity from less than 15 minutes to 15 years.
terralayr is a game changer for energy storage. While there are plenty of battery optimizers out there, we haven’t seen anyone else aggregate storage and build an on-demand marketplace in the way that terralayr has. If batteries are critical to the successful transition to renewables, then terralayr is critical to unlocking the fly-wheel for this multi-trillion dollar asset class.