Sweden's state-owned energy company Vattenfall AB has energized its 1st hybrid power plant combining wind, solar and battery energy storage system (BESS), and says it will serve as a blueprint for future projects.
Energy Park Haringvliet in Haringvliet, The Netherlands is made up of 6 wind turbines representing 22 MW in total, 115,000 solar panels with a combined 38 MW capacity and 12 sea containers for batteries, and all of these are use the same grid connection. Once fully ramped up, the project will generate around 140 GWh annually.
Vattenfall calls it the energy park of the future which was originally meant to be only a wind energy facility, but solar and batteries were added as an afterthought to ensure grid stability and round-the-clock (RTC) power supply.
Sharing some significant learnings from the project, Vattenfall said building an energy park with all 3 technologies is cheaper since they share the same substation, cables, maintenance roads, grid connection, and the ground needs to be dug up only once during the process, hence it is cheaper economically and time wise, instead of setting up 3 separate projects. An additional advantage is that the scarce technical staff is only deployed once for a grid connection, which means that the energy transition can be accelerated, it added.
In the future, the Swedish utility plans to expand work on integrated energy parks and investigate its options from the very beginning. Germany and the Netherlands are high on priority having 'large-scale sun' potential. "But that is not so easy for integrated projects, for example with our eastern neighbors, because the federal states have designated specific areas for wind energy there and you cannot just add sun there. Then we really have to lobby to install solar panels," explained Vattenfall's Head of Solar Development Margit Deimel.
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