Accelerated Energy Storage Deployment in RELAC Countries

Renewables in Latin America and the Caribbean (RELAC) is a regional initiative across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) created in 2019 within the framework of the United Nations Climate Action Summit, with the objective of reaching at least 70% of renewable energy installed capacity and 80% of the region’s total electricity generation from renewables by 2030.

16 countries are members, with others in discussions to join. RELAC provides:

1. Support for addressing technical and financial needs to increase renewable energy penetration
2. Matchmaking with financial resources to support capacity building needs and implementation of renewable energy expansion plans
3. Knowledge exchange via peer-learning and best practices in renewable energy integration to the electrical grid.

Achieving 80% or more renewable energy generation by 2030 will require RELAC countries to manage many complex technical challenges. Effective integration and use of energy-storage technologies will be a key enabling factor for balancing increasing levels of variable renewable energy, providing ancillary services, and ensuring the stability, uptime, reliability, and resilience of the electric grid.

In the last decade, battery energy storage costs declined 88% —a greater decline than any other renewable energy technology over the same period—and those costs are projected to decline even further over the next few decades. While the energy storage sector has made significant advances in markets like the United States and Europe, in RELAC countries, it is still nascent.

In fact, almost 93% of the over 15 GW of global cumulative energy storage capacity deployed from 2015 to 2021 was deployed in China, the United States, Europe, South Korea, and Japan, leaving just 1.1 GW in the rest of the world (including the RELAC countries). A 2021 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report estimated that 111 MW of storage capacity is installed in LAC countries and an additional 87 MW is planned—far below the capacity needed to reach renewable energy goals. This highlights a critical need to build technical capacity, awareness of new technologies, and state-of-the-art industry knowledge to foster an overall enabling environment for energy storage in LAC. These factors will accelerate optimal deployment and use of energy storage, maximizing the regional potential for renewable energy.

To address the regional need for energy storage planning and regulatory support, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in collaboration with the Global Climate Action Partnership (GCAP) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), implemented a program to support the development of country-specific energy storage action plans for RELAC countries, driving investment and policy action that accelerates deployment of energy storage across the region.