Developer NGEN Smart Grid Systems has completed a 10.3MW/20.6MWh standalone battery storage project in Austria, the largest in the country, it claimed.
The Slovenia-headquartered firm has installed the project in Ardnoldstein, which is now grid-connected and participating in the electricity market, it announced last week.
The battery energy storage system (BESS) is made up of Tesla Megapacks, the EV giant’s grid-scale lithium iron phosphate-based (LFP) product, and a total of €15 million (US$16.2 million) was invested into the project.
Roman Bernard, CEO of NGEN Smart Grid Systems GmbH said more about the BESS: “The focus is initially on supporting the Austrian transmission network. But the system also opens up exciting opportunities for building a local energy community market and integrating active electricity consumers.”
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The project was initially going to be built in Klagenfurt near a new substation, but local opposition forced NGEN to choose a new location. The Arnoldstein site was settled on thanks to it being an industrial site as well as 14MW of availability at the nearby Gailitz substation.
As well as Austria, NGEN is also deploying large-scale projects in Croatia and its home market of Slovenia, totalling 50MW/100MWh and 70MW/140MWh in size respectively, with 1GW of projects overall in development in Europe. Energy-Storage.news has been told by a local source that the Croatia project is the largest in the country.
Bernard said that NGEN’s 100MW/200MWh of energy storage in Slovenia “cover half of the system services that serve the grid”, although it wasn’t clear if that figure include the aforementioned project in development.
Austria was recently in the news for being the site of a deployment by German firm CMBlu Energy of its organic flow battery technology, while vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) firm CellCube is also headquartered in Austria.
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