Vattenfall’s battery@pyc, the largest co-located battery installation in the United Kingdom, is now operational and stores renewable wind power from Vattenfall’s Welsh onshore wind farm Pen y Cymoedd. It thereby helps to provide reliability service to UK National Grid.
The 22MW facility, which shares electrical infrastructure with the Pen y Cymoedd wind farm, will help UK National Grid maintain frequency levels and reliability of electricity supply, by storing electricity produced by the wind farm,
Gunnar Groebler, Senior Vice President Business Area Wind, said: “Vattenfall is on the road to a smart, digitalised future, free from fossil fuels. I can think of few other energy installations that better demonstrate what that future looks like than this battery installation.”
The battery is made up of six shipping container sized units, five of which house 500 i3 BMW manufactured battery packs. It uses new lithium-ion batteries with a capacity of 33 kilowatt hours (kWh) supplied by BMW and adapted for a stationary application.
Claus Wattendrup, Head of Business Unit Solar & Batteries, said: “This is Vattenfall’s largest battery installation to date, where we make use of synergies at our existing wind farms sites – such as at Pen y Cymoedd or the Princess Alexia Wind Farm in the Netherlands. Hybrid renewable parks will play a larger role in the future and we are leading this development.”
The 76-turbine Pen y Cymoedd onshore wind farm is capable of meeting the equivalent electricity needs of more than 13% of households in Wales every year. It also boosts delivery of Wales’s climate change ambitions, displacing in an average year more than 300,000 tonnes of CO2 from fossil fuelled generation.
Vattenfall is a leading European energy company, that for more than 100 years has electrified industries, supplied energy to people’s homes and modernised our way of living through innovation and cooperation. We now want to make fossil-free living possible within one generation. Therefore we are driving the transition to a more sustainable energy system through growth in renewable production and climate smart energy solutions for our customers. We employ approximately 20,000 people and have operations mainly in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, the UK and Finland. Vattenfall is owned by the Swedish state. For more information: corporate.vattenfall.com