European inverter manufacturer SMA Solar Technology will supply equipment to a 200MW large-scale energy storage project in Korea, including 1,000 battery inverters.
The project is aimed at securing reserve power in the Asian country. Due to its border with North Korea obviously being closed and its land mass extending as a peninsular into the sea with no other neighbours on its immediate borders, this is seen as an acute issue in Korea. Balancing power is therefore being brought online with this latest project, which will include an initial six month test operation to qualify it for use.
State-owned power utility Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) is running the energy storage project, which will see lithium-ion batteries from an unnamed Korean manufacturer combine with 24MW of power conditioning capability supplied by SMA’s storage-ready Sunny Central inverters.
The inverter maker will deliver 24 Sunny Central 1000 model inverters and system technology, with deliveries beginning in November. SMA pointed out that it is the only non-Korean company working on the project, with its other partners all local awardees.
Going forward, SMA said KEPCO is expected to carry out a number of further projects similar in scope. Systems being used for frequency regulation of the grid will be invite to bid some of their capacity into the reserve power market, effectively giving the batteries a multiple use case.
SMA’s president of off-grid and storage, Volker Wachenfeld, said that not only could the SMA battery inverters “provide a full range of grid management services such as frequency control or grid congestion management,” while the deployment of storage-ready inverters and batteries to provide reserve and stabilise the grid could also enable the continued deployment of renewable energy worldwide.