Energy Warehouse - A New Concept for NEOM Mega Project

There is a global acknowledgment for greenhouse effect and resulting global warming. Countries around the globe are establishing plans to reduce carbon emissions by adopting green sustainable forms of energy. Furthermore, there is also a parallel global race for creating free economic zones within countries to attract business and investment, namely, to diversify their economies and move away from fossil fuels. With its mega project “Neom”, Saudi Arabia is planning to enter the race in a major way. Neom will be a city bordering on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan with unparalleled capacity for sun and wind. It is envisioned that Neom will heavily rely on renewable energy, thus, it is conceivable that it will be formed of clusters of microgrids with distributed renewable energy sources. However, the stochastic nature of solar and wind energy sources impacts power production causing imbalance between generation and demand. This imbalance, will no doubt grow with time causing frequency to become even less stable and challenging to control. Recent advances in energy storage technology, however, offer a wide range of alternatives to choose from for different applications. This has motivated the development of the energy warehouse (EW) concept, a controlled and managed massive modular energy storage system. Sized and located properly, EW can offer significant technical and economic benefits for Neom including buffering the difference between demand and supply within microgrids, not only to stabilize, but also to suppress frequency abnormalities, reducing losses, mitigating congestion, and increasing efficiency.