Dutch wind farm operator contracts Greener Engineering for ‘mobile’ stationary batteries

While energy storage system (ESS) batteries are often described as stationary storage to distinguish them from batteries used in automotive applications, a new partnership in Europe turns containerised ESS into mobile power sources.

GreenChoice, a renewable energy retailer headquartered in the Netherlands, is developing ESS battery ‘docks’ along with German engineering startup Greener Engineering. GreenChoice’s wind farms will be used to charge the latter company’s containerised battery energy storage units with electricity.

Those batteries can then be “wheeled” over to customers that need a mobile or emergency power source. Greener Power Solutions co-founder Dieter Castelein previously wrote a technical paper for PV Tech Power (reproduced here in full on the Energy-Storage.news site) about how mobile energy storage units can be used to “take-over” grid functions when grids need maintenance.

Greener also provides energy storage to outdoor events including popular dance music festivals in Europe, providing a cleaner alternative to diesel generators that have long been necessary for such occasions where there is no grid connection to get power directly from. The engineering company told Energy-Storage.news today that the partnership with GreenChoice now gives both provider and customer an option to do this with renewable wind power.

“If a festival or construction site needs an energy solution, we can provide a battery. And when the battery is empty, we can quickly replace it with a battery that is recharged with wind energy,” Dieter Castelein said.

For the latest project, 10 mobile systems of uniform size with a total capacity of 3,360kWh form the charging station. Batteries themselves come from Greener’s partnership with provider Alfen.

They can charge from GreenChoice’s Hellegatsplein wind farm in just 43 minutes and are used on a day-to-day basis to help regulate frequency of the grid by matching imbalances in supply and demand. It’s also GreenChoice’s second large-scale battery deployed at one of its wind farms, after a 10MWh battery was installed at Hartelkanaal wind power station near Rotterdam last year.