Innovative energy storage developer Younicos has installed an intelligent energy storage system designed to facilitate better grid management around the town of Tussenhausen in Bavaria, Germany.
Photo Credit: Smart PowerFlow energy storage plant inauguration, Bavaria, Germany, September 2, 2015, via Younicos.
The installation was carried out under the ‘Smart PowerFlow’ project, a partnership between Younicos, Bavarian grid operator LEW distribution GmbH (LVN), the Reiner Lemon Institute, and SMA Solar Technology AG.
The completed storage system was unveiled on September 2 and is based around a 200 kW/400 kWh vanadium redox battery. (For insights on vanadium flow battery technology see this CleanTechnica article on vanadium flow vs lithium-ion batteries.) The developers claim that it is the largest battery installed to date in Bavaria.
The Smart PowerFlow project sought to demonstrate how batteries may contribute towards cost-efficient measures to reinforce low voltage electrical grids that are supporting high shares of renewable power.
Clemens Triebel, co-founder of Younicos, said: “We are delighted to show how versatile intelligent battery storage can be used at the distribution grid level. Like our already commercially operating battery power parks on the transmission network level, locally installed intelligent batteries also enable us to use more renewable energy.”
Solution To A Problem
Like most places, transmission networks in Bavaria were originally established with distribution of centrally produced power in mind. Such grid architecture doesn’t fit well with renewable energy power generation though, since it doesn’t accomodate multiple, disparate sources of variable power — think, wind farms, PV, and so on — feeding into a common grid particularly efficiently.
Additional technological solutions are therefore required to manage so-called distributed power generation. Not the least of which are solutions to counter congestion in the grid, which can emerge when electrical supply and demand isn’t balanced.
In today’s Bavaria, there exists an unprecedented amount of wind and PV power generation. The introduction of storage technologies like this one is therefore an essential aspect to harnessing the full potential of renewable energy capacity available to a region.
The new storage system, and others like it, will allow for the storage of surplus electricity generated through renewable means to be supplied back into the grid as required. This allows grid operators to better balance generation and consumption, but also works to maximise the amount of clean energy that’s present in the grid at all times in spite of the intermittency of generation from either wind or solar systems.
The work is of course characteristic of Younicos — a global pioneer in the field of intelligent energy storage and grid solutions, its work capitalises on smart software programming in order to optimise the application of batteries into electrical grids.
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