Energy conversion equipment specialist Ingeteam has supplied a battery energy storage system (BESS) for the Puertollano facility in Spain, the world’s largest operational green hydrogen plant.
The Puertollano renewable hydrogen production plant in Ciudad Real, built and owned by utility Ibredrola, was inaugurated in March 2022 by Spain’s king Felipe VI.
It will use a 20MW electrolyser to produce up to 3,000 tonnes of green hydrogen a year for a nearby factory producing green ammonia and fertilisers, run by Fertiberia Group. Iberdrola said that makes it the largest plant of its kind operating anywhere in the world.
The plant includes a 100MW PV farm with bifacial modules and an attached 5MW/20MWh BESS unit that was provided by Ingeteam, it announced yesterday (May 30).
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Ingeteam provided a turnkey service with on-site assembly and subsequent commissioning. Lithium-ion batteries were integrated into four 40-foot containers totalling 1.25MW/5MWh each and the battery converters were integrated at the power stations.
The PV farm will power the electrolysers meaning the green hydrogen facility can be run entirely on renewable energy. The BESS will flatten out the peaks and troughs in solar energy production, storing the energy generated during the day and using it to power the electrolysers at night when solar production drops.
At the time of the launch of the Puertollano green hydrogen facility in March, Iberdrola chairman Ignacio Galán said the project was the start of €2 billion (US$2.14 billion) of investment to replace imported gas with green hydrogen in the production of ammonia for fertilisers. Puertollano totalled €150 million of investment, although it is not clear if this includes the BESS too.
Ingeteam’s recent BESS projects have all been in the medium-duration space. It recently announced plans to build a 70MW/340MW system in Italy, nearly five hours’ duration, a few months after supplying a three-hour system, also in Spain. In December it revealed it had supplied inverters for a four-hour co-located system in the US.
