Energy Storage Strategies Shift to Precision Deployment to Address Varied Risks, Costs, and Technology Needs

The global energy market is expanding at an unprecedented pace. Driven by energy transition goals, the need for power system resilience, and the growing penetration of renewable energy, energy storage deployments are accelerating across a wide range of settings—from urban commercial buildings, hospitals, and data centers to industrial parks and even remote islands. Each of these site types faces fundamentally different risk profiles, and these differences are profoundly reshaping technology choices and safety standards for energy storage systems.

Trends in Taiwan and worldwide indicate that energy storage is no longer a "one-size-fits-all" solution. Instead, system planning must be precisely tailored to key variables such as location, climate, end-use, and population density. Storage systems in urban areas and critical facilities carry higher public safety risks and are subject to far stricter regulatory and insurance requirements. Any incident could trigger cascading impacts on transportation, healthcare power supply, and information services.

As a result, these sites prioritize safety and the reliability of thermal management over minimizing upfront costs. By contrast, in remote areas—such as wilderness regions, offshore islands, or mining sites—social risk is lower, but challenges including limited maintenance personnel, extreme temperatures and humidity, dust and corrosion, and logistical constraints place greater demands on equipment durability and operational stability. In such environments, cooling efficiency and precision thermal control become decisive factors in ensuring long-term system performance.

These challenges are accelerating the industry's shift toward more advanced thermal management technologies. One example is LiquidShield™ immersion cooling technology, which directly immerses batteries in a non-conductive cooling liquid. This approach significantly reduces temperature differentials and the risk of thermal runaway, while delivering higher reliability in high-temperature, enclosed, low-airflow environments or applications requiring long-duration stable output. Studies indicate that immersion cooling can extend battery health, improve thermal efficiency, and enhance overall system safety—factors that are increasingly valued in safety- and durability-critical applications. As a result, competition in energy storage deployment is shifting from a focus on installed capacity to site-specific adaptability. The ability to make storage safer in urban settings, more durable on offshore islands, and more reliable in hospitals is fast becoming the key determinant of leadership in the next phase of energy market growth.

Operations and Maintenance Challenges

As the saying goes, dreams are always better than reality. For developers, the completion of an energy storage project is not the finish line; the true challenge lies in ensuring safe and stable operation over the long term. Yet operations and maintenance (O&M) requirements vary significantly by site type. The following case analyses illustrate these differences for reference.

Urban and Commercial Areas

With convenient transportation and readily available manpower, on-site inspections are relatively easy to carry out. However, high population density also means congested O&M routes and stricter constraints, such as the requirement to maintain uninterrupted power supply during repair and servicing periods. In addition, urban projects typically demand 24/7 monitoring and rapid-response capabilities, necessitating more sophisticated and comprehensive monitoring, alarm, and fire protection systems.

Critical Facilities (e.g., Hospitals and Data Centers)

While these facilities have traditionally relied on legacy backup power systems such as diesel generators, modern energy storage systems must now be integrated into existing power architectures without disrupting ongoing operations. The requirements for response speed and reliability are the most stringent in such environments. As a result, operations and maintenance must follow highly rigorous standards, with elevated expectations for preventive O&M, redundancy planning, and system reliability to ensure near-zero tolerance for power interruption.

Industrial Parks

Industrial zones are typically equipped with established power and network infrastructure, making it easier to deploy maintenance engineers when needed. However, due to the large scale of projects, systematic monitoring, standardized operating procedures, and regular inspection regimes remain essential to ensure long-term safety and performance stability.

Remote and Offshore Areas

Remote regions and offshore islands often face the challenge of "limited manpower and long distances." Traditional on-site inspections are time-consuming and labor-intensive; therefore, maintaining stable operation depends heavily on remote monitoring and predictive maintenance technologies.

Studies indicate that in energy storage deployments across multiple, geographically dispersed sites, the combination of large equipment volumes, heterogeneous site conditions, and manpower constraints becomes a critical bottleneck. As a result, advanced IoT-based monitoring and intelligent O&M systems are increasingly becoming an industry necessity.

Impact of Environmental Conditions

Natural environmental factors play a critical role in the selection and safety performance of energy storage systems. Urban and indoor environments are generally regulated by air-conditioning or ventilation systems, resulting in fewer instances of extreme temperature or humidity; however, in dense cities, the urban heat island effect can still place additional pressure on thermal dissipation. Industrial park deployments may be located near mountainous or open plain areas; in high-altitude or cold regions, low temperatures can significantly reduce battery capacity, necessitating insulation and heating designs.

In wilderness or desert environments, strong winds carrying sand and dust can clog cabinet cooling systems, degrade electrical insulation performance, and even cause short circuits. These conditions require fully enclosed equipment designs and sand-proof measures—such as sealed filters and dust-resistant enclosures—as well as structures capable of withstanding large day–night temperature differentials and sandstorms. Coastal and island locations face high salinity corrosion and typhoon risks, making corrosion-resistant materials and reinforced foundations essential. In summary, environmental parameters—including temperature, humidity, altitude, and particulate exposure—have a substantial impact on energy storage safety and must be thoroughly considered during equipment selection and system design.

Safety Requirements in High-Risk and Sensitive Sites

Because the consequences of accidents can be severe, high-risk or highly sensitive sites impose much stricter safety requirements on energy storage systems. In densely populated areas or locations supporting critical functions, any loss of control may lead to catastrophic outcomes, necessitating the most stringent safety standards and technologies. A notable example is the lithium battery fire in a UPS system at a South Korean national data center in 2025, which reportedly caused nearly one-third of government information systems to go offline—underscoring the extreme safety demands placed on data-center energy storage.

These cases illustrate that in dense or mission-critical environments, energy storage design must not only comply with top-tier international standards such as UL 9540 and IEC requirements, but also focus on eliminating risks at the source. In this context, innovative solutions such as full immersion cooling offer a new pathway forward. By immersing each battery module in a non-conductive cooling fluid, immersion cooling significantly enhances heat transfer efficiency and suppresses thermal runaway risks. In the event of a fault, the cooling fluid can immediately inhibit fire propagation, fundamentally reducing combustion hazards. Such technologies are particularly well suited to applications where safety cannot be compromised, effectively lowering the probability of accidents in urban settings and around critical infrastructure.

Case Studies and Industry Trends

According to data from Taipower, the deployment of energy storage systems (ESS) is increasingly evolving toward site-specific and application-driven strategies. In urban areas and critical facilities, both governments and enterprises are prioritizing safety and system resilience. For example, Shanghai has been actively promoting the development of virtual power plants (VPPs) and energy storage demonstration hubs.

In 2024, the city's new energy storage industry reached an estimated scale of approximately RMB 12 billion, with projections indicating it will more than double to over RMB 30 billion by 2025. On the demand side, the dispatchable capacity of user-side virtual power plants is planned to increase from around 1.1 GW today to 2.2 GW by 2027.

By contrast, deployment in remote areas and offshore islands has focused primarily on supporting renewable energy integration and microgrids. Kinmen Island, for instance, has successively installed multiple energy storage systems, including fast-response lithium-ion batteries and large-capacity lithium–sulfur batteries, to smooth the output of wind and solar generation and perform peak shaving and load shifting. These examples underscore a clear pattern of differentiated development strategies: urban areas emphasize "stable power supply plus virtual–physical integration," while offshore islands and remote regions prioritize the integration of local renewable resources to enhance grid resilience.

Looking ahead, the global energy storage market is expected to continue its robust expansion. According to international research reports, the global energy storage market surpassed USD 19.7 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow beyond USD 70.6 billion by 2035, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 13.6% between 2026 and 2035. The International Energy Agency (IEA) further forecasts that under a net-zero pathway, global grid-scale battery energy storage capacity will expand from 11 GW in 2022 to around 170 GW by 2030. The Asia-Pacific region, driven by rapid industrialization and urbanization, is expected to account for more than 38% of global market share.

In practical terms, urban areas will primarily deploy small- to medium-scale, user-side or virtual power plant–based energy storage systems, coordinated through smart grids for peak regulation. Regions with abundant energy resources but low population density, by contrast, will favor large-scale, centralized energy storage facilities deployed alongside wind and solar generation to enhance grid stability. Under these evolving trends, disparities in safety requirements across different site types will become increasingly pronounced: for high-risk or sensitive locations, elevated safety standards and innovative technologies will be critical to project implementation, whereas low-density areas will be better positioned to focus on cost efficiency and operational resilience.