Short description of the doctoral thesis:

Comparative political and legal framework market analysis for stationary battery storage systems to integrate renewable energies in the US and Europe 

During the last years, the US and Europe electricity market was successively penetrated by renewable energies. These increasing renewable energy capacities, which are often based on volatile renewable energies, such as wind power and photovoltaic, are increasingly challenging the system stability. Besides specific flexibility instruments on the supply and demand side, stationary battery storage systems have the ability to enable a further expansion of renewable energies, due to their bidirectional transformation process. Therefore, some US federal states and EU member states have already selectively implemented support measures for batteries or modified market regulations.

In that regard, the fact that batteries are multi-application technologies is of major relevance. Batteries, particularly along the electrical value chain, are applicable in many different ways by diverse actors and thus, have different value creation sources. This multi-application characteristic is of great importance for policymakers. It provides them with additional degrees of flexibility in the design of market integration strategies: they can decide on promoting a particular application and/or on reframe market conditions. Against this background, the dissertation examines the way in which policymakers can promote at a national and supranational level the market integration of battery storages, by means of comparative multi-level case study analyses. The aim is to derive practical and theoretical systemic determinants for a further battery storage market integration in particular and for multi-application technologies in general.