Another big battery ready to join Dutch grid

A hybrid energy storage system combining lithium-ion and flywheel technology is ready to join the Dutch grid and provide frequency stabilization services, helping to use abundant renewables generation capacity more efficiently. The 10 MW system in Heerhugowaard, a city in North Holland province, was delivered by Switzerland-headquartered Leclanche, which provided engineering, procurement and construction services, and Dutch energy storage specialist S4 Energy.

The new storage system features a combination of Leclanche’s lithium-ion battery tech coupled with S4 Energy’s Kinext flywheel storage system, to provide primary control power for frequency stabilization. It is designed to deliver 9 MW of power for frequency control with 1 MW dedicated to load displacement applications. pv magazine has asked Leclanche for the energy storage capacity of the project.

It is the second utility scale project combining the two storage technologies on the Dutch grid. An initial S4 Energy-Leclanche project was deployed in Almelo, a city in the Overijssel province of the eastern Netherlands, to support frequency stabilization for Dutch transmission system operator Tennet.

The Almelo project combines 8.8 MW/7.12 MWh of lithium-ion batteries with six flywheels that add up to 3 MW of power. According to the project partners, the combination with fast-responsive flywheels reduces the energy throughput and number of cycles of the li-ion batteries and ensures an improved usage profile and longer system lifetime – to a minimum of 15 years.

The second grid scale hybrid storage system is joining the Dutch grid hot on the heels of the country’s largest battery to date. A 25 MW/48 MWh battery touted as the first large scale battery project based on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry in Europe, has been delivered by Finnish technology group Wartsila, it was announced this week.

The deployment of utility scale batteries in the Netherlands is particularly important given the serious network congestion warnings caused by the rapid growth of intermittent renewable energy capacity on the grid. Bottlenecks on the Dutch network have become so dire Tennet has considered offering large scale solar power generators incentives to reduce their output or power down entirely.

Congestion

This year, grid connection issues in the Netherlands were laid bare by Netbeheer Nederland, the Dutch association of national and regional power network operators, in its updated congestion map for the high-voltage and medium-voltage grids, which showed areas experiencing increasing constraints for the deployment of large scale solar and wind plants.

“Grid capacity has already been greatly expanded by installing more transmission lines and transformer stations … however that is not fast enough as solar parks, for example, are being built faster than grid operators can build,” the association said. Deploying utility scale batteries is another way of addressing this issue.