Swedish energy company Vattenfall has commenced operations of a 22MW battery energy storage facility at its 228MW Pen y Cymoedd wind farm in the UK.
Image: Battery system installed at Pen y Cymoedd wind farm. Photo: Courtesy of Vattenfall AB.
The new battery system shares electrical infrastructure with wind farm. By storing electricity produced by the wind farm, it will help the UK National Grid maintain frequency levels and reliability of electricity supply.
The battery system is made up of six shipping container sized units, five of which house 500 i3 BMW manufactured battery packs. The energy storage facility uses new lithium-ion batteries with a capacity of 33 kilowatt hours (kWh) supplied by BMW.
Vattenfall business unit solar & batteries head Claus Wattendrup said: “This is Vattenfall’s largest battery installation to date, where we make use of synergies at our existing wind farms sites – such as at Pen y Cymoedd or the Princess Alexia Wind Farm in the Netherlands.
“Hybrid renewable parks will play a larger role in the future and we are leading this development.”
The wind farm generates enough power to be supplied to 188,000 homes in the UK. The wind farm, which includes 76 turbines, is capable of meeting the equivalent electricity needs of over 13% of households in Wales.
The Pen y Cymoedd wind farm is also capable of offsetting more than 300,000 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
Inaugurated in September 2017, It was built by a 50:50 joint venture of Jones Bros and Balfour Beatty for Vattenfall.
Vattenfall and BMW signed a supply agreement for the supply 1,000 of its lithium-ion batteries to the energy storage facility.
In September last year, the company had also signed a letter of intent to conduct a pilot project based on SaltX large-scale energy storage technology – EnerStore – at Vattenfall´s combined heat and power plant in Berlin.
The idea of f the pilot project was to look at the ways in which surplus electricity can be stored as heat in dried salt.