Dive Brief:
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Norwegian oil company Statoil plans to add a 1 MWh lithium-ion battery system to a floating offshore wind farm in late 2018, Greentech reports.
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The state-owned company is building the 30 MW Hywind floating wind farm about 15.5 miles (25 km) off the coast of Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The project is due online next year.
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Statoil says energy storage system, dubbed the Batwind project, will use batteries to capture excess wind power, reduce balancing costs and increase revenues through price arbitrage.
Dive Insight:
Developers are beginning to explore the combination of two cutting edge technologies: offshore wind and utility scale battery storage.
In December, Deepwater Wind proposed a 90 MW wind farm in the waters 30 miles southeast of Montauk, N.Y, that combines 15 wind turbines and two battery systems.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Statoil is combining battery storage with a floating wind farm. The Hywind wind project in Scotland will cover around four square kilometers in water that is about 285 to 360 feet deep and where average wind speeds in are around 10 meters per second.
Statoil will connect the Batwind battery system on the coast where the wind farm’s export cable comes ashore. Statoil also said it would be investigating the potential for offshore storage with batteries integrated into turbine towers. The cost of Batwind has not been disclosed.
Statoil is expected to select a battery vendor in early 2018 and install the system later that year. The pilot project will test both the technical solution and the commercial application of the battery storage connected to a wind farm.
“With Batwind, we can optimize the energy system from wind park to grid,” said Stephen Bull, Statoil’s senior vice president for offshore wind, in a statement. “Battery storage represents a new application in our offshore wind portfolio, contributing to realizing our ambition of profitable growth in this area.”
Statoil has not put a time limit on the pilot, but eventually wants to develop Batwind into a commercially viable proposition for wind energy storage.
Statoil plans to capture the data from the Hywind pilot floating wind farm project and use it to develop full-scale wind farms in the future.
Hugh Sharman, principal at Danish energy consulting firm Incoteco, said the Batwind project signaled growing price-competitiveness for battery storage.