Sungrow has signed a 2.4GWh strategic deployment agreement with SUNOTEC, a solar PV solutions provider, for battery storage systems in Bulgaria and elsewhere in Europe.
Under the agreement announced earlier this week (27 July), Chinese PV inverter and battery energy storage system (BESS) company Sungrow intends to supply BESS to SUNOTEC solar PV projects across Europe, including projects in Bulgaria entered into a new government support scheme worth BGN 1.15 billion (US$670 million).
While details were not disclosed, SUNOTEC said the portfolio will include several large-scale projects across Bulgaria, although the company also hinted that some of the capacity could go to solar plants elsewhere in Europe.
Bulgaria’s support scheme, RESTORE (National Infrastructure for Storage of Electricity from Renewable Sources), is financed within the framework of the European Union (EU) Recovery and Resilience scheme set up to aid economic recovery post-COVID19 pandemic.
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In April, the country’s Ministry of Energy announced that 82 winning projects totalling almost 10GWh had been selected from 151 proposals, after RESTORE opened for bidding in August of last year.
In May, a 500MWh BESS was inaugurated in Lovech, northern Bulgaria, claimed to be the biggest project of its kind in the EU to date, and described by Minister of Energy Zhecho Stankov as “the first step towards achieving the goal of having 10,000 megawatt-hours of operating batteries in the country within the next year.”
In addition to RESTORE, another Recovery and Resilience fund scheme, which concluded in November, is specifically for renewables paired with energy storage in Bulgaria. Through it, funding was awarded to 3.1GW of renewables and 1.1GW of energy storage.
SUNOTEC signed up to SolarPower Europe’s energy storage push
Sungrow will supply its customer with the PowerTitan 2.0 BESS for the majority of the pipeline, although it will also provide its SG350HX-20 PV and Medium Voltage Solution (MVS) string inverter equipment for a hybrid solar-plus-storage project, SUNOTEC said.
Sungrow launched PowerTitan 2.0 in 2023. The liquid cooled BESS integrates a 2.5MW power conversion system (PCS) and 5MWh battery storage capacity into a standardised 20-foot ISO container form factor. The agreement with SUNOTEC is the company’s first to include projects in Bulgaria.
Incorporated in Bulgaria and Germany, SUNOTEC is an integrated provider of services, including engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) and operations and maintenance (O&M) for solar PV projects, battery storage system management, and plant repowering.
In early July, the company’s joint venture (JV) with financial services and insurance company Eurohold Bulgaria inaugurated a hybrid solar-plus-storage project in the municipality of Oryahovo, in the Vratsa region of the country.
JV Solaris Holding’s Selanovtsi Hybrid Photovoltaic Power Plant pairs 59.8MWp of solar PV with a 107.3MWh lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery storage system.
SUNOTEC acquired a 400MWp/600MWh solar-plus-storage project in Latvia from developer Danish Sun Energy a few days after the Selanovtsi plant’s inauguration was announced.
The solar company is among the four strategic partners of the Battery Storage Europe Platform, founded by trade association SolarPower Europe as a “major new initiative to drive forward the business case and regulatory framework for battery storage across the European Union,” featuring 50 other member organisations.
