A consortium involving Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and utility EDF has been named preferred bidder for three battery energy storage plant (BESS).
Total capacity
South Africa’s Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) awarded the consortium three BESS projects totaling 257MW/1,028MWh of energy storage out of a total that was given five bids.
The consortium includes IPP Mulilo which is majority-owned by CIP and the renewable arm of French based EDF, namely EDF Renewables.
Construction cost
The battery energy storage plant are slated to cost ZAR 7 billion US372 million and construction begins mid-reports workers’ union. 15-year PPAs will be signed for the delivery of electricity to the grid controlled by TSO Eskom.
The five projects secured by DMRE are part of a 513MW 2,052 MWh tender that the agency announced in March This year. They will all be located in South African Eskom substations but they’ll not only provide capacity, energy but also services such as Instantaneous Reserves , Regulating Reserves the Ten resesers and Supplemental reserves .
According to the initial tender document, Aggeneis and Mookodi will both have a generation capacity of 77 mega watt while Nieuwehoop is expected to be at 103MW. For the four-hour duration and total capacity, Aggeneis and Mookodi should both be 308MWh while Nieuwehoop will stand at about 412MWh.
IPP Scatec, based in Norway won a 103MW/412 MWh deal recently covered by Energy-Storage.news through the same DMRE procurement while no one has revealed who is going to be winner of the fifth lot.
Robert Helms, partner at CIP, commented: “We applaud the determination of South African authorities to quickly deploy battery energy storage, a technology block with significant importance for Mulilo.”
There was some controversy about what technologies would qualify for the tender specifications in energy storage community with a consultancy declaring that flow batteries would not satisfy it, which eventually dismissed by parent company of vanadium redox flow battery developer.
Eskom and the South African government will rely on energy storage to strengthen grid capacity by means of various procurement programmes for diversifying renewables.
One is the Risk Mitigation IPP Procurement Program (RMIPPPP) for solar and storage, with Saudi company ACWA Power recently winning a project that includes a 1200MhBESS. Scatec commenced construction of one of its won bid projects in December and EDF is also involved in developmental efforts for RMIPPPP.
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