The topic of industrial and commercial energy storage is a classic topic for establishing communication with all energy storage practitioners. No matter whether they are industry leaders or high-spirited sales elites, as long as they talk about this topic, they all have some sad stories to share.

From exhausting technical competition to shockingly low-price competition, there are also various reliable and unreliable middlemen in between. "No one wants to complain, but the reality is really hard," said a staff member of an energy storage company.

Indeed, since the explosive growth of domestic industrial and commercial energy storage in 2023, various types of capital have continued to pour in, and cross-border giants have emerged in response. According to statistics, nearly 600 industrial and commercial energy storage system integrators are currently expanding their territory and staking out their territory in this field.

Among them, the most important means of development is price war. In 2023, the price of industrial and commercial energy storage cabinets of leading manufacturers was about 1.5 yuan/Wh. By the beginning of 2024, the price quickly dropped to 0.88 yuan/Wh.

Although the discounts have been very good, the growth rate of the industrial and commercial energy storage market is still not enough. With too many people and too little porridge, various intermediaries have become active. However, the actual order completion rate has not become more ideal.

The sales manager of a storage company said in an interview: "The group of middlemen is mixed. Cheating is the least of their worries. Some will use the same project information to cast a net and fish. Although the order can be placed, the profit margin is extremely low in the final calculation. Integrators can only continue to reduce costs. However, except for the leading enterprises that occupy the supply chain advantage, most mid-level enterprises can only make a difficult trade-off between cost and quality."

After weighing various considerations, many companies have made concessions on quality, but everyone knows that such a trend is definitely not conducive to the overall development of the industry.

Based on the principle of whoever suffers should change, industrial and commercial storage enterprises have taken the initiative to start transformation and exploration to improve quality and upgrade.

First of all, in terms of application methods, in addition to peak-valley arbitrage, market demands such as demand response, emergency power backup, and increasing the utilization rate of renewable energy are met. The addition of AI also enables remote monitoring, intelligent diagnosis, and automatic upgrade of smart energy management, which reduces operation and maintenance costs while improving the reliability of the energy storage system. In addition, grid-type energy storage technology has also become a key layout focus of industrial and commercial storage systems.

As enterprises with different backgrounds become the target customer group of industrial and commercial storage, segmented application scenarios have become the single breakthrough target of system integration companies. Recently, what leading companies are most concerned about and most optimistic about is the application prospects of industrial and commercial storage systems in large industrial scenarios.

Previously, the application scenarios of industrial and commercial energy storage products were extensively set within the broad concept of industry and commerce, but there were specific differences in the energy storage needs of different industrial and commercial categories.

Commercial buildings have more comprehensive and rigorous requirements for the safety of energy storage systems due to their densely populated locations. In addition, the electricity demand of commercial buildings is also more complex and diverse, requiring industrial and commercial energy storage systems to be able to achieve flexible configuration and precise scheduling.

Charging stations require energy storage systems to balance the load on the power grid, ensuring that they can meet the charging needs of a large number of electric vehicles during peak charging periods and improving charging efficiency.

Data centers require extremely stable electricity. Any unexpected situation may lead to data loss or equipment damage. Previously, a fire in Alibaba Cloud's Singapore computer room caused the company's service to be interrupted.

As an important part of the mobile communication network, the stable operation of communication base stations is crucial to ensuring smooth communication. Therefore, when deploying energy storage systems at communication base stations, it is necessary to take into account the intelligent management and optimized scheduling of electricity consumption while providing a stable power supply.

The energy storage system in the industrial microgrid needs to realize the effective storage and scheduling of distributed power generation, emergency power supply, peak load regulation and other auxiliary services.

Light industrial manufacturers such as textiles and small commodities choose to install energy storage systems in order to ensure continuous production and achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

Large equipment in large industrial parks with heavy loads and high energy consumption is started up in the morning and evening, which puts great pressure on them. They need ultra-large current support and have higher requirements on the stability of the energy storage system.

The above is not a complete inventory of various representative industrial and commercial energy storage application scenarios and their demand characteristics. I believe that more detailed scenarios will be explored in the future.

Although there is also a view that the overall architecture and underlying logic of industrial and commercial energy storage products are extremely clear, promotion for a single scenario is more of a marketing strategy for the company.

However, the head of a cement company that has installed an energy storage system said in an interview: “There are countless products in the huge industrial and commercial energy storage market. As users, we need to pay huge costs in the stage of selecting suitable products. The merchants’ active refinement of scenarios has indeed facilitated everyone’s choice.”

Therefore, when users begin to actively look for industrial and commercial energy storage systems that are more suitable for their own scenarios, companies that have product standards above the standard line and actively explore more application scenarios will be favored first .

While benefiting users, segmented scenarios also help manufacturers gradually get rid of the "quagmire" of low-price involution. A staff member of a system integration company also shared: "In segmented scenarios, users may have specific needs for certain equipment, perhaps PCS, BMS, battery cells, fire protection or cabinets. This trend can help component companies actively get close to users, optimize products, and thus achieve the overall evolution and upgrade of the system. At the same time, when users at the scene end actively choose to install industrial and commercial storage products, they will pay more attention to the overall performance of the products and will not deliberately lower the prices. The higher profit margins also reserve more performance opportunities for manufacturers."