Latvia's Future Electricity Needs a Flexibility Layer: The Case for Green Hydrogen and PtX
A recent Latvian feature asks how much electricity the country will need in the decades ahead — a vital and timely question. We add the project developer's view: as renewables scale, the answer depends less on raw capacity and more on flexibility, where BESS coupled with green hydrogen and PtX can anchor long-duration storage, project bankability, and Latvia's energy independence.
NEWS
HydrogenLatvia
6/13/20264 min read
A timely question that deserves a wider frame
Latvia is in the middle of an overdue conversation about its own energy. A recent feature in the outlet lasi.lv, part of its "Sava enerģija" series, puts the question plainly: how much electricity will the country actually need in the years ahead. That is exactly the question worth asking now, while the choices that shape the next two decades are still open. The honest part of the discussion is that demand is set to climb — electrified transport, heating, reshored industry and rising prosperity all pull in the same direction.
Where the framing tends to narrow is in treating this mostly as a question of how many megawatts to build and from which source. That matters, of course. But for anyone developing renewable or Power-to-X projects on the ground, it is only half the picture. The harder, more interesting half is flexibility — and that is where the hydrogen and PtX perspective adds something the generation-only view leaves out.
Flexibility is the half of the equation that is easy to miss
As wind and solar grow as a share of the mix, the binding constraint stops being how much you can install and becomes when that generation actually shows up. The grid pipeline already tells the story. We understand that roughly 6,046 MW of capacity has been reserved at Latvia's transmission grid, with solar making up close to 59 percent, wind around 15 percent, and hybrid projects the remaining quarter. That is a weather-driven fleet by design. A system leaning that heavily on variable output needs two things in larger measure than before: flexible consumption that can move with the resource, and flexible, dispatchable capacity that can fill the gaps when the wind drops and the sun sets.
Where batteries end and hydrogen begins
Battery storage is the obvious first answer, and it is the right one for the daily cycle — shifting a few hours of midday solar into the evening peak. But batteries are built for hours, not days or seasons. When the question shifts to multi-day lulls, winter weeks of low wind, or storing summer surpluses for the cold months, the economics of pure battery storage run out of road. This is where green hydrogen and PtX come in as the medium- and long-duration storage layer — LDES, in the language now entering Baltic energy planning. Electricity that would otherwise be curtailed becomes hydrogen, e-methanol, e-ammonia or e-fuels that can be stored, moved and burned or converted back later. BESS and PtX are not competitors. They are two ranges of the same flexibility instrument, and a serious demand forecast should account for both.
Closing the loop with distributed, dispatchable hydrogen power
Storing surplus renewables as hydrogen only pays off if you can turn it back into power when the system is short, and that second half of the loop is no longer theoretical. We covered the proof of it recently: Wärtsilä ran what it calls the world's largest pure-hydrogen engine at its Bermeo site in Spain, synchronised to the national grid and running on 100 percent hydrogen — firm electricity from a zero-carbon fuel, delivered on demand.
What makes that milestone relevant here is not its scale but its shape. An engine like this can sit idle and then ramp to full output in under a minute — exactly the profile a wind- and solar-heavy grid needs for the hours after sundown or during a multi-day lull. Stack several units and you have hundreds of megawatts of flexible capacity, but you do not have to. The same hardware works in modest increments, sited close to where the power and the hydrogen already are.
That is the distributed LDES picture, and it fits Latvia almost too neatly. Hydrogen produced from local wind and solar, stored on site, and re-electrified through engines at ports, industrial parks, district-heating nodes or data-centre campuses — flexible capacity owned where the demand sits, rather than a single central plant. The flexible hydro along the Daugava already gives our system a backbone; distributed hydrogen power would extend that flexibility to the places the grid reaches last. The technology is proven. What it waits on here is someone willing to pilot the first project and treat dispatchable clean power as an asset worth owning.
Coupling PtX with BESS to de-risk wind and solar economics
There is a commercial argument here that rarely makes it into the demand debate, and it deserves to. Many Latvian wind and solar projects are stalling not because the resource is poor or the technology unproven, but because the revenue case is too exposed — to curtailment, to hours of near-zero or negative prices, to merchant risk no lender wants to underwrite alone. A flexible offtaker changes that math. An electrolyser sized alongside a battery gives a project somewhere to send power when the grid will not pay for it, putting a floor under the business case. Coupling PtX with reinforcing BESS is, in practical terms, one of the few ways to hand wind and solar developers the certainty they need to reach a final investment decision. Without that certainty, capacity stays on paper. With it, projects move.
From import dependence toward export potential
The independence dimension is where this stops being a niche storage discussion and becomes a national one. In 2024, domestic generation covered an estimated 84.6 percent of Latvia's electricity demand, with the balance imported from neighbours. Indigenous production of alternative fuels flips part of that exposure into an asset. Hydrogen and PtX let Latvia turn its own wind and solar into storable, tradable molecules — energy that can be exported rather than only consumed, and that displaces imported fossil fuels at home. That strengthens not just Latvia's resilience but the wider European effort to decouple from imported hydrocarbons, which is the whole point of the corridor and collector infrastructure now taking shape around the Baltic Sea.
The build-out and the flexibility layer belong in the same plan
So how much electricity will Latvia need. More than today, certainly — but the figure alone answers the wrong question. The one that decides whether the system works, and whether the renewable projects behind it ever get built, is how flexible that electricity will be. Generation capacity and the flexibility layer are not two debates. They are one. Treating green hydrogen and PtX as part of the demand picture and the storage portfolio, rather than an afterthought to it, is what turns Latvia's electricity ambitions into projects that close.
Source: Sava enerģija. Cik elektrības Latvijai vajadzēs nākotnē