Wärtsilä will supply two 10MW/10MWh battery energy storage systems to a utility in the Cayman Islands.
The Finland-headquartered technology company will provide the BESS units under an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the Caribbean Utilities Company Ltd (CUC).
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They will be located on Grand Cayman, the largest of the country’s three islands, and will be the country’s first utility-scale projects. They are expected to be operational by mid-2023.
Wärtsilä will provide its modular utility-scale energy storage product, GridSolv Quantum, which will be controlled using its energy management system (EMS), the GEMS Digital Energy Platform. The GEMS platform has numerous capabilities for island power systems, including short term overload capacity, voltage support, black starts and peak shaving.
The energy storage facilities will allow CUC to better utilise existing power plants as well as integrate some 29MW of customer-sited distributed renewable energy resources, without impacting the stability of the grid.
The new systems will connect to the Hydesville, West Bay and Prospect sub-stations, which will provide power system optimisation services like spinning reserve capacity.
Until now, the three-island nation’s power system has been made up of 161MW of diesel generation and 14MW of solar PV.
“Energy storage has proven to be a game changer for our numerous island-based customers in the Caribbean and beyond to simultaneously lower energy costs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase renewable energy consumption, and improve grid reliability,” said Jon Rodriguez, Director, Engine power plants, Wärtsilä Energy in North America.
Wärtsilä has a strong track record in delivering BESS solution and grid optimisation services to island power systems. Projects previously reported on by Energy-Storage.news include those on the US Virgin Islands, Roatan (Honduras), the Bahamas and most recently Hawaii.