In this article, published in El Mercurio, the CENTRA UAI researcher, Felipe Larraín, highlights that Chile has been increasing variable renewable generation capacity for several years with solar photovoltaic and wind power plants. However, he assures that the intrinsic variability of resources poses difficulties that encourage innovation.

In the short term, battery-based energy storage systems offer an alternative to alleviate transmission congestion, delay investments, arbitrate energy and other services. Additionally, these systems will increase their performance and reduce their cost by at least 50% in the coming years.

”On a smaller scale, batteries can encourage dynamism in distribution networks and facilitate the incorporation of incipient generation technologies. However, in the medium term the main opportunity for innovation is the manufacture of clean zero emissions fuels””, says Felipe Larraín.