Introduction to the Alignment Score series
There is a peculiar dynamic that anyone who has spent some time in renewable energy development will recognise, even if few say it plainly: the volume of confident opinion in this industry has grown considerably faster than the underlying evidence base.
I recently spent some time quantitatively checking where geographically Poland's battery storage market is going, where curtailment may actually sit and whether the two correspond. The clue was to test whether current investment geography supports the regional balancing model spoken about publicly.
Over the coming weeks I will be sharing the findings, the methodology and the limitations as a starting point for a more rigorous conversation.
And that is because the answer I received was not what the prevailing industry narrative would suggest. The misalignment, when you look for a pattern, is severe at the extremes and may have real impact for how the transition unfolds.
The index, voivodeship by voivodeship
The index presents a proportion between 0 and 1 measuring how well BESS deployment in each voivodeship matches the level of curtailment risk, local energy need and RES ratio. The closer to 1, the better suited the deployed battery capacity is to local conditions. Global alignment score across all voivodeships: 0.63.