Statkraft has signed a second hybrid power purchase and battery optimisation agreement with Warrington Borough Council, covering a solar farm and battery storage site it owns in Gloucestershire.
Cirencester Solar Farm, which is wholly owned by Warrington Borough Council, incorporates a 23MWp solar farm and a DC-coupled 10MW battery storage facility, and is the first large-scale DC-coupled solar and storage facility in the UK.
The DC-coupled configuration at Cirencester is different to other sites, in that it involves connecting the solar panels and battery cells behind a shared inverter, which converts the electricity directly to AC for export to the grid.
This avoids extra conversion stages, allowing batteries to be more efficiently charged from the solar panels, and means Statkraft can more effectively optimise the battery in a more integrated way with the clean, renewable electricity generated there.
This new deal means Statkraft now optimises five co-located renewable energy and battery sites across the UK and Ireland on behalf of its customers, including the York hybrid site also owned by Warrington Borough Council, which was signed in June 2020.
This deal expands Statkraft’s leading optimisation capabilities covering co-located and hybrid sites, demonstrating its ability to cover all types of AC and DC-coupled configurations.
Statkraft Head of UK Energy Storage, Markets, Nick Heyward said: “Having worked with Warrington Borough Council on optimising their first hybrid solar and battery site in York, we are delighted to be further expanding our relationship and managing this technically advanced project.
“The DC-coupled nature of the site required us to adopt a different optimisation approach and involves expanding further the technical capabilities of ‘UNITY’, our trading optimisation platform, to deal with such co-located sites.
“As grid-connection capacity becomes challenging to secure across the UK, we’re expecting to see the deployment of more co-located storage and renewables which need similar advanced optimisation approaches.”