Spain’s first utility scale solar plant linked to storage goes online

From pv magazine Spain

Spanish inverter manufacturer and storage system provider Ingeteam has connected to the grid a 40MW solar plant coupled to 3MW/9MWh of storage in Spain.

Located in the department of Almaraz, in the southern region of Extremadura, the Arañuelo III facility was developed and built by Spanish energy company Iberdrola and is part of a photovoltaic complex with a combined capacity of 143MW.

The plant is the first large scale solar plant to incorporate batteries in Spain and the storage system is the first of its kind being installed within the photovoltaic plant in a distributed manner, following a DC-coupling configuration.

According to the manufacturer, the batteries are installed within the solar array and the battery converters share the DC connection with the PV inverters, offering several key technical advantages such as the so-called clipping recapture, which offers the possibility of utilizing the extra power from the solar panels that is not used in the peak production hours, and a more efficient discharge, due to the fact that no power transformer is required.

“This novel technique to create a hybrid PV generation system with battery energy storage, was made possible thanks to the development by Ingeteam of a new battery converter: the DC-DC series of the Ingecon Sun Storage Power family,” Ingeteam said in a statement. “This converter is coupled to the DC input of a PV inverter, thereby obtaining, in practice, a hybrid central inverter with a direct coupling to the solar panels and batteries alike and with a single AC output that is coupled to the LV/MV transformer.”