France-headquartered independent power producer (IPP) Neoen has given system integrator Nidec ASI the green light to start work on a 40MW battery storage unit in Sweden, Neoen’s first in the country.
Nidec ASI will now start work on the Storen Power Reserve, a one-hour system in the municipality of Ragunda that will provide frequency containment reserve (FCR) ancillary services to transmission system operator Svenska Kraftnät.
The battery system will come into commercial operation in the first half of 2024, the companies said. Neoen will own and operate the asset.
It is Neoen’s first battery storage project in Sweden and its third renewable energy project there, after the Storbrännkullen wind and Hultsfred solar projects which are under construction and set to start construction in the second half of this year, respectively.
It is the company’s second battery project in the Nordics after it enlisted Nidec ASI to build it a 30MW/30MWh unit in Finland in 2020.
Battery energy storage projects in Sweden have started to ramp up in the past year as the country’s pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) reaches the upper limit of its capacity to balance the grid.
Last month, developers OX2 and Ingrid Capacity started work on two battery storage projects totalling 60MW of power while the latter said in September that it was also building a 70MW unit, the largest in the country – all three for 2024 delivery dates.
Sandwiched in between those two announcements by Ingrid was news of what was claimed by project developer Alight to be the largest solar-plus-storage unit in the country, combining a 2MW battery system and an existing 12MW solar PV array. The company said in October that the new energy storage system would come online in two months’ time.
Nidec ASI is the Italy-based industrial solutions division of Japanese conglomerate Nidec Corporation and was ranked as one of the largest battery storage system integrators in the world in IHS Markit’s 2021 report.
It has recently signed big deals with lithium-ion battery gigafactory startup FREYR to build 12GWh of battery energy storage systems a year by 2030, and deploy 5.4GWh of battery systems by an unnamed company in Italy.
Neoen has been even busier in the last few weeks and months with several large project announcements in Australia.
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