SIEW 2026: Asia’s Solar-Storage Adoption Faces Revenue, Policy Hurdles
Battery energy storage systems or BESS are becoming solar deployment enablers across Asia, but uncertain revenue streams, changing market regulations and investment risks could hinder adoption, industry speakers said at the Asia Clean Energy Summit on Wednesday.
Speakers at the Summit, held during the Singapore International Energy Week, emphasized the need for commercially viable business models, stable policy frameworks and greater coordination across the value chain to raise storage deployment in the solar industry.
Lawrence Wu, chief financial officer of EDP APAC and council member of the Sustainable Energy Association of Singapore, said making battery storage an investable asset class would require market structures that allow developers to generate revenue from multiple services, such as energy arbitrage, grid services and capacity provision.
Such revenue stacking arrangements would need to be supported by regulations that remain stable over a 10- to 15-year period to make projects bankable, he added.
“Coming to this potential will require more than just technological advances. You will depend on the right policies, structures, financing models, infrastructure and partnerships to support deployment,” Wu said in his opening address.
Matt Pearce, national industry leader for energy, mining and property at KPMG Australia, noted the multiple roles battery storage can play in supporting solar integration and grid reliability.
These include providing frequency response to stabilize power systems within seconds, shifting excess daytime solar generation to periods of higher evening demand through energy arbitrage, and maintaining reserve capacity to support grid reliability.
Pearce added that coordinated efforts among network planners, policymakers, investors, retailers and operators would be important to develop reliable and affordable electricity systems built around solar and storage.
“Solar is scaling because it’s commercially viable. Storage is an unlock for that and integrating rules so that investors, customers and the system come together is the task in front of us now,” Pearce said.
Investment risks and emerging business models
Khan Yao, managing director of Seraya Partners, said hybrid solar and storage projects have gained traction in Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia, where policy reforms have encouraged the integration of batteries with solar deployments.
However, he noted that revenue uncertainty remains a key challenge for infrastructure investors, particularly for batteries providing grid services such as frequency response.
“The difficulty in batteries when you start looking at newer applications, such as in frequency responses, you can’t predict the price and the volume. And if you can’t do those two, it’s honestly very hard for us to underwrite as an infrastructure investor,” he added.
Some other speakers shared that to mitigate exposure to volatile electricity markets, investors could adopt tolling arrangements, under which BESS owners receive contracted payments for making storage capacity available to traders or operators, rather than taking on direct market trading risks.
Such arrangements have emerged in established markets including Japan and Australia, Khan said.
Beyond conventional grid applications, Khan said Seraya Partners were also exploring opportunities to replace diesel-based power systems with battery storage across its portfolio of data center investments.
Modular storage solutions
Frank Phuan, founder and chief executive officer of Equator Renewables, highlighted the importance of deployment speed in addressing Asia’s energy challenges, such as execution timelines that should be considered alongside the traditional energy trilemma of affordability, reliability and sustainability.
“We have the usual energy trilemma but I would like to add another dimension to it, which is the speed of execution. Policy to execution takes years, but the things that you can control are in the execution, so we believe that speed of execution is the point here,” Phuan said.
He spoke about the development of prefabricated, containerized solar and storage technologies that could reduce installation time, labor and EPC costs.
One example is the company’s module “solar box”, a 40-foot containerized system capable of delivering 250kW of solar capacity and being deployed in less than half a day, according to Phuan.
Such modular systems could be integrated with mobile storage solutions to serve applications including mining operations, waterways, green hydrogen production and distributed data centers, he added.
Despite the opportunities, Deepesh Nanda, managing director and chief executive officer of HyperVault, warned that the economics of solar plus storage systems remain challenging when required to meet peak daytime demand, which could require substantial battery capacity.
Nanda also highlighted supply chain concentration as a risk to solar deployment, given China’s dominance in polysilicon, ingot and wafer manufacturing.
“I think the biggest risk today in terms of solar is the supply chain because no other country other than China has polysilicon ingot and wafer available at scale, and that is a concentration risk that looms very large for the solar industry,” Nanda said.
SIEW 2026 is being held in Singapore this week, concluding on Friday.
–Reporting by Brian Ng, brian.ng@dowjones.com; Editing by Mei-Hwen Wong, mei-hwen.wong@dowjones.com