Peterhead, Scotland, 2 July 2018: Masdar (Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company) and the Norwegian multinational energy company Equinor (formerly Statoil) have installed, and will soon begin testing, a new battery system designed to store electricity generated by Hywind Scotland, the world’s first commercial-scale floating wind farm, the companies said in a Press communiqué.

The battery storage solution is the first in the world to be connected to an offshore wind farm, the communiqué said. The project is designed to evaluate the capabilities of advanced storage technologies to optimise the release of electricity from renewable energy plants to transmission grids – from both a technical and commercial perspective, the communiqué further said.

Deployed at an onshore substation, the battery system known as “Batwind” has a storage capacity of 1.2 megawatts, equivalent to the battery capacity of more than 1.3 million iPhones, the communiqué said. By helping to mitigate peaks and troughs in production, the project aims to maximise the commercial value of Hywind Scotland’s electricity output, the communiqué further said.

The communiqué said the Hywind Scotland wind farm was inaugurated in October 2017 and Masdar holds a 25% stake in the project while Equinor owns the remaining 75% per cent. The communiqué further said the wind farm is made up of five 6-megawatt (MW) turbines floating 25 kilometres off the coast of Peterhead, in northeast Scotland.

The communiqué said, following the successful installation of Batwind, Masdar and Equinor will now explore how the new storage solution can be utilised to improve the operational and cost-efficiency of other wind farms – to open up new commercial opportunities in an expanding global wind power market.

Bader Al Lamki, Executive Director for Clean Energy, Masdar, said: “Energy storage is vital to unlocking the full potential of renewables by mitigating the variable nature of wind and solar power. Batwind will help us to understand how we can deploy this new technology in future projects, both in solar power and wind power plants. Batwind exemplifies how we at Masdar are moving forward with our partners, through innovation and collaboration, to bring commercially viable solutions to the renewable energy sector.”

According to a recent International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) report, the cost of installing battery storage systems could fall by two-thirds (66%) by 2030, the communiqué said. Operational data from Batwind will be assessed based on the weather, market prices and consumption patterns to create an intelligent and optimised storage system, the communiqué further said.

Sebastian Bringsvaerd, Development Manager, Hywind, said: “The variability of renewable energy can to a certain extent be managed by the grid, but to integrate even more renewables, we will need to find new smart solutions for energy storage to reduce system integration costs and provide firm power. How to do this in a smart and value-creating way is what we are aiming to learn from Batwind.”