From El Prat to Cáceres the journey is long and requires a lot of energy. The novelty is that from now on this energy can be stored.
Alter Enersun, an Andalusian company dedicated to the promotion of renewable electricity generation facilities, has developed and invested in a pioneering project in Spain: batteries that store photovoltaic energy on a large scale to supply it to the grid when it cannot be produced or to match demand and supply at specific times of the day.
To this end, it has commissioned its subsidiary, Alterna Energía, a firm based in El Prat de Llobregat, to design, develop and maintain this facility, at the Cáceres 2020 (51 MWp) and 2021 ( 53 MWp) located in this province of Extremadura.
Specifically, through this operation, 1 MWp of electrical energy production will be added, apart from the start-up of this battery, which unlike the smaller ones that are adapted for residential use, has a price and a much higher complexity. This hybridization plant (this is its technical name) is one of the first in Spain of this type.
The energy storage systems of each plant have five converters with a maximum active power of 200 kW, with a total of 1,000 kW. In addition, both the batteries and the converters will be governed by a smart controller that will give the instructions for the storage or discharge of the batteries depending on the generation of the park, and will be connected to the control center of all plants.
Alterna Energía, which has been working in this sector for 15 years, expects to invoice around 32 million euros this year, a slight increase compared to the 29 million of the previous year. Esther Morlanes, director of Alterna Energía, considers that storage is an essential technique in the energy transition process, since it allows solving several problems, such as the intermittency of electricity production from renewables, and also always satisfying the market demands, which can be more or less tense depending on the seasons and times of the day.
Alter Enersun, the parent company of Alterna Energía, has more than 150 photovoltaic installations on rooftops and on the ground in Spain, Portugal and Mexico, and is focused on large self-consumption and hydrogen projects.
