Lithium-ion battery manufacturer Hithium will provide 55MWh of battery products for a solar-plus-storage project being built by EPC firm SolarPro in Bulgaria.
China-based Hithium will provide the battery energy storage system (BESS) technology to SolarPro for the project in the southwest town of Razlog, Bulgaria, which also features 33MWp of solar PV.
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SolarPro is providing turnkey engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) services on the project for owner Renalfa IPP, a developer-operator, and construction will start next year. The announcement claimed it is the largest BESS ‘in implementation’ in Southeast Europe.
It comes shortly after Bulgaria launched a public consultation into a grant scheme to support the deployment of up to 150MW of utility-scale energy storage in the country, with ultimate plans to facilitate the deployment of 350MW of the technology.
Hithium is one of the few companies producing lithium-ion batteries at scale with a focus on energy storage systems (ESS) rather than electric vehicles (EVs).
For this project Hithium will provide 16 containers each with a capacity of 3.44MWh capacity, comprised of the company’s 280Ah cells. The company did launch a 5MWh container product using its newer 314 Ah cells at the RE+ expo and conference in Las Vegas in September, but that does not appear to be being used for this project.
The tie-up with SolarPro in Bulgaria comes four months after Hithium launched in Europe, opening an office in Munich amidst a targeted ramp-up to 135GWh of production capacity globally by 2025. A month later it raised US$620 million in private capital.
More recently, it announced a 1GWh memorandum of understanding (MOU) with US developer Perfect Power to provide BESS there.
Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media is currently putting on the third edition of Large Scale Solar Central and Eastern Europe in Warsaw, Poland 14-15 November 2023. The event focuses on Eastern Europe with a packed programme of panels, presentations and fireside chats from industry leaders responsible for the build out of solar and storage projects in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Hungary. For more information visit the event website.
