Europe’s Largest Energy Storage Project Celebrates its One-Year Anniversary of Commercial Operation

The Mintey project is Europe’s largest energy storage project at 99.8MW/99.8MWh and is about to celebrate its one-year anniversary of commercial operation. The project was completed in April 2021, and has been operating safely and efficiently with outstanding results.

Spanning across land larger than a football field, the 99.8MW/99.8MWh Minety project was installed with Sungrow’s NCM and LFP battery energy storage system (ESS) solution featuring high integration, minimizing the footprint and slashing the commissioning time which significantly reduces the system cost.

Sungrow ESS enables the project to be active in the UK local capacity market, frequency regulation market, triads market as well as arbitrage trading in spot and balance markets. Notably, the project preferentially provides Dynamic Containment (DC) services in the frequency regulation market and can earn 17 pounds per MW per hour.

As the latest frequency regulation service, DC services request the plant to respond to the power instruction of the grid within one second. Sungrow ESS well meets the requirement, making the project one of the rare 30% of the UK’s storage plants equipped with this function.

It’s reported that the project benefits more than expected with an Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of over 15%.

The success of the Minety energy storage project has attracted an increasing number of partners, such as Enlight Energy, Afcon, Dalia Energies, Kahana Group, Solegreen, and the Energix Group, to visit the site. In addition, the Chinese Ambassador Zheng Zeguang visited the site in mid-March.

Energy storage unlocks the full potential of renewables. “It’s the era of energy storage,” said James Wu, Vice President of Sungrow. Despite making huge strides forward, the energy storage industry's work in helping stakeholders across the value chain understand the technologies and the roles they can play in a renewable energy future is far from complete. Sungrow is prepared with new innovations like the liquid cooled ESS solutions and solar-plus-storage solutions to the thriving sector, the Company stated.