Battery storage system in industrial environment stabilises grid of the future
Paderborn, 19 December 2023. The team running the INZELL research project (network support and system service delivery through an industrial cell with stand-alone grid compatibility and renewable energies) has set up a temporary outdoor power lab on the campus at OTH Regensburg. One of the core components of the lab is the commercial storage system INTILION | scalebloc made by energy storage supplier INTILION from Paderborn. Together with an emergency generator, this energy storage system is what forms the network in the experimental setup. The intention is to take the findings from this lab and test them on a larger scale, namely in field trials at the plant power grid belonging to industrial company Max Bögl, which already runs a large INTILION | scalecube storage system with a capacity of 2.25 MWh. The aim of the project is to test and validate a range of strategies for creating and regulating stand-alone grids for the power grid of the future.
Grid-forming battery storage units keep the power grid stable
“The proliferation of volatile PV systems and wind turbines connected to supply power grids is continually boosting the importance of grid components that form and therefore stabilise power grids. Battery storage systems are especially useful for providing grid-forming characteristics. Our involvement in the INZELL research project allows us to test operating management strategies for grid-forming systems in great detail,” explains Pascal Lefarth, Technical Manager C&I Storage Solutions at INTILION.
The power lab is delivering valuable insights which the team then intends to use to design a stand-alone grid control system and optimise parameters at Max Bögl’s plant. The test setup enables them to carefully investigate operating strategies and system behaviour specifically within highly dynamic and transient time ranges. This could not be done to the same extent in an actual working power network, where you cannot reproduce extreme scenarios that would threaten ongoing production. Despite this, the components used and the way the battery storage system is expected to behave differ only slightly from their equivalents at the Max Bögl works grid, despite the lower power categories involved. This means the knowledge gained will be transferable to later arrangements.
Test lab setup
The grid-forming power generation units are a scalebloc battery storage system (68.5 kVA / 72 kWh) and an emergency generator (50 kVA). A regulatable inductive ohmic load bank, a capacitor bank and an asynchronous machine are used to simulate different consumer behaviours. The stand-alone grid test setup operates at low voltage (400V/230V). Its components allow researchers to investigate potential extreme scenarios in the power network of the future, such as partial overloads, black starts and resynchronisation processes.
The INZELL research project: stabilising energy systems using industrial cells
The aim of the INZELL project is to show that industrial businesses can play an essential part in changing the way energy is used and can act as stabilising elements in decentralised power systems. It is a 1.65-million-euro research undertaking funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and will run over a period of three years. OTH Regensburg is performing the analyses in conjunction with the Technical Universities of Munich and Clausthal.
For more information, please visit: https://forschungsprojekt-industriezelle.de/
