European energy company Vattenfall is combining a 22MW wind power plant with 38MW of solar PV at a hybrid project in the Netherlands, integrating the capacity with 12MWh of batteries from carmaker BMW.
It will take little over a year to complete the project according to Vattenfall, with a planned operational date of September 2020. The 60MW power plant and its battery storage system will cost a total of EU61 million (US$68.17 million) investment and one company executive said that such hybrid projects are “an important building block” in the energy transition.
While the likes of Shell CEO Ben Van Beurden have conceded that renewables with batteries are likely to become the mainstream of energy in interviews a couple of years back and with his company taking on the acquisitions of energy storage company Sonnen and aggregator Limejump since then, Van Beurden of Shell has talked about this process happening over decades.
Vattenfall’s senior VP, and head of its wind power business Gunnar Groebler said his company “wants to enable fossil-free living within one generation,” adding that “hybrid power plants are an important building block for us in the direction of 100% fossil-free power generation.” A company representative confirmed to Energy-Storage.news that its the company’s first hybrid to combine wind, solar and storage, although it has executed wind-plus-storage projects already in the Netherlands and the UK.
“The complementary wind and solar generation profiles reduce the load on the grid compared to a single generation technology,” Groebler said.
“Hybrid systems provide less pronounced peaks and we see fewer total times without production. This leads to a more efficient use of the network infrastructure. In addition, the costs for grid connection are significantly reduced compared to stand-alone systems,” in turn reducing the cost of renewables, Groebler said.
Read more: Energy Storage News