RWE Renewables, a subsidiary of the German energy company RWE AG has completed the construction of Germany’s first mega battery. The company was able to construct a battery system with a total capacity of 117 MW / 128 MWh in approximately 14 months. The new system can start within seconds and produce the required power for around an hour. At the RWE power plant locations in Lingen (Lower Saxony, 49 MWh) and Werne, a total of 420 blocks of lithium-ion batteries have been installed (North Rhine-Westphalia, 79 MWh).
Reportedly, the battery storage system has already fed electricity into the grid and is currently going through a trial run. Commercial operation is scheduled to start in the next few days. Tests have also been successfully carried out on the software that RWE developed for intelligent linking to the Moselle power plants. Furthermore, the regular application of the programme is scheduled to start later in 2023.
As per the statement, during the implementation of this project, RWE was able to draw on extensive in-house experience in energy storage systems. The company took exclusive control of project planning, modelling, system integration and commissioning. Also, because the mega battery takes advantage of available areas at RWE power plant sites, the batteries can utilise existing grid infrastructure to feed electricity in and out of the grid.
Earlier this month, Equinor and RWE decided to collaborate on creating offshore wind farms capable of producing green hydrogen in order to establish value chains for low-carbon hydrogen. In order to replace coal-fired power plants in Germany with gas-fired power plants that are still prepared to use hydrogen, the partners intended to build a low-carbon, renewable hydrogen production facility in Norway.
