Masdar has announced preferred suppliers and contractors for its 5.2GW solar PV and 19GWh battery storage project in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Utility-scale renewable energy developer-operator Masdar said on Friday (17 January) that it has selected CATL to supply battery energy storage system (BESS) equipment alongside fellow Chinese companies Jinko Solar and JA Solar as solar PV module suppliers.
Meanwhile, POWERCHINA and India’s Larsen and Toubro are the project’s preferred engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractors.
The project will be deployed at an as-yet-undisclosed location in Abu Dhabi, designed to enable the ‘round-the-clock’ day and night dispatch of 1GW of renewable energy to the grid.
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As such, the US$6 billion project is claimed by Masdar and its development partner Emirates Water & Electricity Co. (EWEC) to be the biggest project of its type in the world to date.
Masdar, which has three Abu Dhabi state entities as its shareholders, announced the project on 10 January, at the beginning of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week (ADSEW).
At that time, Masdar chairman and minister of industry and advanced technology for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Dr Sultan Al Jaber, said in a speech that solving the intermittency of renewable energy resources was “the moonshot challenge of our time,” particularly in light of projected energy demand growth as data centre buildout gathers pace.
CATL to supply 6.25MWh ‘zero degradation’ BESS solution
Masdar’s subsequent announcement of preferred suppliers and contractors was made as ADSW drew to a close.
CATL, the world’s biggest lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery manufacturer, is vertically integrated in the stationary battery storage space and makes everything from cells to racks, cabinets and complete systems.
The company will supply the Abu Dhabi project’s full 19GWh of BESS capacity, supplying its Tener BESS solution which was launched in April last year.
The product attracted attention throughout the energy storage industry for its 6.25MWh capacity per 20-foot container, as well as a claim by CATL that the system will not experience degradation from its rated capacity during the first five years of operation at one full cycle per day.
While over the past year or so the industry had begun to converge around 5MWh as a sort of standard for higher energy density containerised BESS, CATL—and some others, including EVE Energy—have launched systems that go beyond that.
At the time of Tener’s launch, CATL revealed that it is equipped with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry cells with an energy density of 430Wh/L, far above the typical industry range of 140-330Wh/L.
Meanwhile, the five-year ‘zero degradation’ guarantee was made possible by pre-lithiation (essentially putting ‘spare’ lithium in the cells, which are gradually released over time) and by a reduced consumption of lithium-ions during each duty cycle, CATL executives revealed a couple of months later at the Intersolar/ees Europe event in June.
Meanwhile, Jinko Solar and JA Solar will supply Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact (TOPCon) solar PV modules for the 5.2GWdc of solar arrays at the Masdar-EWEC project in the UAE.
At the beginning of this year, CATL was designated to be linked with the Chinese military by the US Pentagon and is expected to become ineligible to supply US Defense Department projects.
The addition of CATL to a list of prohibited suppliers came just over a year after a CATL battery system was disconnected at a US Marine Corps microgrid project, although in that case, the decision taken was over alleged links between the manufacturer and the Chinese Community Party, not the military. It remains to be seen what impact this will have on the company’s overall activities in the US market, but could lead it to focus more on markets outside North America, such as the Middle East, Asia and Europe.
