Utility EWS AG and developer MW Storage have completed the expansion of a battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Switzerland from 20MW to 28MW The companies inaugurated the newly expanded project last week in a ceremony last week (24 May), which adds 8MW to a 20MW/18MWh BESS that MW Storage originally commissioned in 2020 The announcement didn’t reveal the MWh energy storage capacity of the expanded project. Prior to the expansion it was the joint-largest BESS in the country by megawatts along with a 20MW/20MWh system owned by independent power producer (IPP) Axpo. EWS’ BESS project has primarily been deployed to help transmission system operator (TSO) Swissgrid keep the grid stable via the provision of frequency response services to maintain a 50hz frequency It is being monetised in the Swiss electricity market by both CKW The BESS is part of a network of power plants The large-scale BESS market in Switzerland has been relatively quiet with renewable penetration on the country’s grid still relatively low. Axpo commissioned its BESS in February this year while utility Thurplus commissioned a 3MW system in September last year. But Switzerland was the location for one of the largest energy storage projects commissioned in recent years, a 20GWh pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) unit which started operations in June 2022 in the Canton of Valais MW Storage is a developer of BESS projects which is also active in the German market, with a 100MW/200MWh project underway that it claimed is the country’s largest. I spent two weeks with Sr Veera Bara in Caltanissetta the migrants would happily raise their voices from afar calling out "Mamma" as they greeted us Sr Veera Bara began working with refugees here in 2015 A member of the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross helping them obtain the necessary documents and medical care in case of poor health When I asked how she finds the courage to do this challenging task helps me go beyond religious and cultural barriers It gives me courage to move forward in helping others ‘Everything is possible with God and for God’” Sr Veera was born on 13 July 1957 in Neematoli Farsabahar in India’s Chhattisgarh district Her family prayed evening prayers at home and Veera participated in the sodality for children she would lead the prayers and songs in the village she joined the Holy Cross Sisters in 1978 after attending one of their schools Sr Veera accepted an invitation to work as a missionary in Uganda She left for her new mission in October 1993 It was a challenge to mold herself to the new environment and from her superiors helped her carry out various roles as pastoral and social worker superior and councilor during her 22 years there In 2015 Sr Veera received another call to go to Sicily to live in an inter-congregational This community was created at the request of Pope Francis who had heard the cry of the migrants on Lampedusa in 2013 Pope Francis expressed his desire that women religious work among the migrants to the International Union of Superiors General (UISG) On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the UISG in 2015 the Superior Generals decided to open 2 centres in Sicily to help refugees Religious from various congregations were invited to form a community and work together there the group received Pope Francis’s blessing to begin their new mission in Sicily unknown challenges… Motivated by the charism and motto of her congregation she took one courageous step after the other she was asked to accompany 20 Nigerian women hosted in a local convent Her experience with them taught her a lot about trafficking mentally and spiritually broken were in need of someone There she was shocked to find around 170 Muslim refugees living in the open air under tents made of grass Their cry for basic necessities made her forget her own small difficulties The sisters’ presence helped remind the migrants that God (whom they call Allah) was with them and the spring of hope started to blossom in their broken hearts concern and love freed Sr Veera from her fear of encountering them she took one more challenging step and began to teach Italian to the migrants her classroom was filled with 25 to 30 boys who liked her method of teaching Veera also became a mediator between the migrants and religious leaders police and school authorities in Caltanissetta something her late brother had told her came true “You have left your family and you will find a lot of homes and loving people brothers and sisters.” She began to feel like a member of these migrant families “when migrant families consider me a member of their family and share their joys and sorrows After 5 years of service among the migrants in Sicily Thank you for reading our article. 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Just click here Switzerland’s largest battery storage system has gone into action stabilising the electricity network for transmission grid operator Swissgrid Switzerland-headquartered developer MW Storage contracted Alpiq to manage and operate the 20MW / 18MWh containerised battery energy storage solution in the resort town of Brunnen the project is a “purely privately financed initiative,” and has been “implemented without public assistance and free of subsidies” A Swiss investment foundation and two local banks financed the project which is MW Storage’s first “megabattery” The containerised lithium-ion battery storage was supplied by MW Storage’s technology partner The system has already pre-qualified in late September to provide secondary control frequency reserve services to Swissgrid and as it also sits in Alpiq’s wider portfolio alongside the company’s hydropower systems According to Swissgrid guidelines secondary control power helps maintain supply and demand of energy within a control area to keep the grid operating at its required frequency of 50Hz Power stations providing this service must be ready to be called upon by the central grid controller Alpiq’s asset optimisation head Bruno Meuriot said his company is seeking to make the energy storage system as profitable as possible for customer MW Storage and the strategy used to do this includes bundling up the storage system alongside other assets including third-party and smaller systems to provide services Alpiq said that as this is one of only a small number of utility-scale battery assets in Switzerland so far and the previous largest was a 7.5MWh system installed by NEC in 2019 there has been little standardisation of this type of project or its optimised operation so far in the country There was close cooperation between all of the parties involved the fact that the company has done some projects of this type before meant that Swissgrid accepted the Brunnen battery system for secondary control reserve pre-qualification faster than may have been the case for projects from competitors “Our big advantage is that we have a battery concept for ancillary services that we can more or less pull out of the bag,” project manager Alexandra Zigkiri said “It’s a concept that Swissgrid has already accepted before.” Zigkiri also said that Alpiq’s software for managing “decentralised pools” of assets has already proven itself since 2019 and that the company’s reliance on its “scalable solution…makes it easier for us to incorporate new customers” The battery storage system’s operating status and schedules are sent from Alpiq’s operations team to its trading department using artificial intelligence (AI) software and then decisions to either discharge (and sell) power or charge the batteries are made This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Construction is set to begin soon on a 100MW/200MWh battery storage project in Arzberg through developer MW Storage and asset manager Reichmuth & Co Infrastructure In the southeastern part of Germany near the border with Czechia the project in Arzberg will be on the higher end of grid-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) project sizes in the German market which is seeing something of a return to activity in 2022 and this year The imminent start of construction was announced by Weil and MLL Legal two companies which advised MW Storage on the developer’s formation of a joint venture (JV) to work on the project with infrastructure investment manager Reichmuth With MW Storage and Reichmuth as majority shareholders the E.On-owned distribution network provider Bayernwerk and municipal power production consortium ZukunftsEnergie Nordostbayern (ZENOB) are also involved in the JV The two majority owners are both headquartered in Switzerland while the energy companies are both local to the Bavarian region MW Storage is itself backed by an asset manager, Swiss KMU. The developer put its first BESS project into operation in October 2020 in the Swiss municipality of Ingenbohl. The company noted at the time that the 20MW/18MWh project, performing frequency regulation for transmission system operator (TSO) Swissgrid, was funded without subsidies or public assistance The company has done a similarly-sized project in Finland which went into operation a year after Ingenbohl but to date those are the only two listed as part of its portfolio on MW Storage’s website Global system integrator Fluence – which recently showed quarterly profit in financial results for the first time since its IPO – is MW Storage’s BESS supplier having worked on the companies’ previous two projects The Arzberg project was claimed to be the biggest BESS facility in Germany according to the announcement from legal firm Weil but only retain that title for a short time Germany’s utility-scale BESS market is finally back on the rise and it is perhaps primed to accelerate given growing commitments at national and European Union (EU) level to renewable energy The main economic opportunities in Germany are for frequency regulation ancillary services and energy trading on the wholesale market While the market enjoyed a short boom in the mid-2010s as an early adopter of battery storage for frequency regulation primary control reserve (PCR) quickly became saturated Growing shares of renewable energy and growing volatility in electricity markets across Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine pushing up gas prices have amplified the fundamental drivers for battery storage while a waiver on fees storage operators in Germany were being charged for their use of the grid has been extended for three years there is now also a market for secondary reserve (aFFR) which is pan-European being rolled out across the continent’s grids A feature article for our quarterly journal PV Tech Power (Vol.32) last year examined whether Germany’s utility-scale market was due for revival despite having seen just 32MW of large-scale BESS deployed in 2021 The German market also saw some uplift from the launch of Innovation Tenders – government-backed reserve auctions for projects that combined two low-carbon technologies which has resulted almost exclusively in contracts for solar-plus-storage plants – and so-called ‘NetzBooster’ (‘GridBooster’) projects which are individual large-scale battery assets deployed to directly support the transmission network One of those GridBoosters, to be delivered by Fluence, is 250MW/250MWh and could come online subject to regulatory approvals by 2025 while Fluence was awarded two more, each of 100MW/100MWh In November, developer Kyon Energy got approval for a 137.5MW/275MWh BESS project in Germany’s Lower Saxony region, and while it might not be the biggest BESS in Europe as Kyon claimed The MW Storage-Reichmuth JV project in Arzberg is scheduled to come online in early 2025 Germany’s biggest BESS project was Lausitz Battery Energy Storage System (60MW/52MWh) at a coal plant operated by generator LEAG Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 9th annual Energy Storage Summit EU in London, 20-21 February 2024. This year it is moving to a larger venue, bringing together Europe’s leading investors, policymakers, developers, utilities, energy buyers and service providers all in one place. Visit the official site for more info.