A 60MWh battery energy storage project co-located with an existing solar PV plant has been proposed in Spain, the latest to qualify for a recently-announced €150 million (US$160.7 million) package of grants.
Company ‘Seguidores Solares Planta 2 SLU’ yesterday (14 February) started regulatory procedures to install the battery energy storage system at the 44MW CINCINATO solar PV plant in Badajos, Extremadura.
A full project description said the battery system will have a power output at the interconnection point of 30MW and an energy storage capacity of 60MWh, a two-hour system. Nameplate installed power of the battery system will be 38.5MW.
It also said the system would be comprised of 22 battery containers totalling 3.5MWh each, and the total budget for the energy storage project is €33 million.
The storage unit will charge from the solar PV and provide renewable load shifting services. Although a site photo (above) in the project description, dated 2023, shows the PV yet to be built, the regulatory filing said the Cincinato plant is ‘in operation’ and has ‘permission and connection to the transmission grid at the Brovales 400 kV electrical substation’, run by grid operator Red Eléctrica de España.
Although the ultimate developer behind the project was not been revealed in the filing, a spokesperson for Enel Green Power, the renewables arm of Italy-based energy firm Enel, confirmed to Energy-Storage.news that it is their power plant.
Enel Green Power announced it was building a PV plant called Cincinato in Extremadura in 2021 – although it isn’t listed on its site at the moment – and the firm filed plans for a very similar co-located batter storage project with an investment of €33 million too last month.
A month ago, the Enel Green Power spokesperson said the company was currently evaluating which renewables facilities could be coupled with energy storage in Spain but that decisions had not yet been taken.
Like Enel’s similar co-located battery storage project reported on last month, this new one appears to qualify for a grant scheme launched in December and closing on 20 March, 2023.
Some €150 million has been made available for co-located energy storage projects which are bigger than 1MWh, have a duration of at least two hours and a power output that is 40-100% of that of the renewable generation they are being paired with.
The grant funding will cover 40-65% of the investment costs up to a maximum of €15 million per project and €37.5 million per company if developing multiple projects.
Another project which might qualify is a 100MW/200MWh project proposed for a site in Cuenca, Castilla la Mancha, last month.
A 1.05MWh vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) project which came online at the site of retiring thermal plant in Asturias last week may well have qualified too although the grant scheme appears to have come too late for that one. The scheme covers all storage technologies except green hydrogen.
Spain has a target of 20GW of energy storage deployment by 2030, rising to 30GW by 2050, which has been in place since 2019.
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