Europe’s ‘first commercial battery park’, a 5MWh lithium-ion battery system that was recently tripled in size to 15MWh, has been used to successfully restart a disconnected power grid in Germany.
Energy storage system provider and integrator Younicos originally built and connected the 5MW / 5MWh battery park in Schwerin, a city in northern Germany, in 2014. It was commissioned by utility WEMAG, which has been using the energy storage system to provide frequency regulation and other balancing services to its grid, particularly with regards to enabling the addition of more renewable energy capacity, in a region with numerous large-scale wind power facilities.
Younicos recently completed the expansion of the park, adding an extra 10MW / 10MWh of energy storage this summer, providing the control software for it, helped WEMAG integrate the upgraded capacity and carried out installation of power electronics. The expansion, announced in late October 2016 and finished this July, saw 53,444 lithium-ion batteries added, along with 18 inverters, nine transformers and a medium-voltage system.
According to Tobias Struck of WEMAG’s energy storage contractor Batteriespeicher Schwerin, two different battery types were integrated during this Phase 2 expansion, which was “particularly challenging from the point of view of cooling and the greatly increased capacity of new batteries”.
Black start with ‘Kickstarter’
Recently, there has been increased interest in a handful of regions in the concept of using energy storage batteries to ‘kickstart’ disconnected or dysfunctional grids, a role generally performed by old-fashioned thermal generation plants.
In July, California municipal utility Glendale Water & Power (GWP) connected a 2MW / 950kWh battery energy storage system (BESS) at an electrical substation, designed to be able to regulate the transmission network and balance load, but also capable of providing black starts to generators on its network that have gone offline in unscheduled events.
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