Thailand may lack the Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) necessary to navigate supply and demand challenges. The 2024 PDP draft included 10,000 MW of BESS, but this may see the country struggle to fulfil carbon neutrality and Net Zero commitments over the coming decades.
This plan aims to foster energy efficiency and to bring energy security to Thailand. It reduces the share of coal in the electricity generation, but also foresees an increase of the natural gas contribution. 1) reduce purchase of electricity from people's solar project due to lack of participants.
In addition, 20 million households in Thailand have benefited from an electricity bill subsidy that gave free use of electricity and deductions of bills for the period March 2020 to May 2020.
Their total combined storage capacity was 994 MW. Interestingly, this allowed generators to sign semi-firm power purchase agreements (PPAs) with the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) with minimum availability guarantees. Many solar projects in Thailand have non-firm PPAs in place due to a lack of storage on site.
Thailand’s 2024 power development plan (PDP) aims to increase renewable energy use, highlighting the importance of BESS alongside solar panels and wind turbines. This could create new business opportunities for entrepreneurs if prices decrease or new technologies emerge for stationary batteries.
With the growing share of renewable energy and emerging technologies, establishing and maintaining adequate flexibility is an important part of Thailand’s power system development and modernisation, and the country’s clean energy transition. Power system flexibility is crucial for ensuring security of supply.