Enel Green Power Opens the First Renewable Storage Facility in Italy

Published on Wednesday, 23 September 2015

This innovative facility will store for the first time the energy produced by a photovoltaic power station.

Catania, 23 September 2015 – Enel Green Power (EGP) has today opened in Catania (Sicily) the first Italian storage plant integrated with renewable sources. The storage system with a capacity of 1MW/2MWh is connected to EGP’s 10 MWp photovoltaic plant, Catania 1.

The storage system, fully integrated in Catania 1, can increase management flexibility and uniformity of energy flow, reducing the intermittency that often characterizes some non-programmable renewables, while supplying ancillary services to the grid.

The Catania storage plant uses Durathon technology developed by General Electric, with which EGP has signed a technology partnership providing for experimentation in order to increase the integration of generation plants fed by non-programmable renewables.

Francesco Venturini, CEO of Enel Green Power, stated that the high-tech storage system “will allow to limit the intermittency and properly manage the lack of predictability resulting from some renewable sources”.

The Catania storage plant, which is under testing since May 2015, has tested for the first time in the field the use of a battery to reduce the imbalances between forecast and actual production.

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