The Role of Storage in Emerging Country Scenarios

Despite the electrical energy scenarios are quite different between industrialized countries and emerging and developing ones, for both contexts, energy storage systems could play a key role in the next future. Specifically, in emerging and developing countries, energy storage systems may allow a cost-effective exploitation of renewable sources in order to cope with energy security for centralized energy systems, but mainly to become a building block of rural electrification by off-grid power systems. In this paper a short overview of energy storage systems within the emerging and developing countries scenarios is reported. Specifically the paper provides a description of the typical configuration for batteries within off-grid systems and an overview of the typical economic models for batteries applications and the regulatory frameworks when off-grid applications are introduced. Finally the description of an experimental project in rural area of Tanzania points out the peculiar characteristics of batteries application in off-grid applications.