Thought to be Southeast Asia’s single largest battery energy storage system (BESS) to date will be supplied to a solar PV-plus-storage project in Thailand by Sungrow. The China-headquartered inverter manufacturer said a few days ago that it will supply a comprehensive solution — including 49.01MW of PV inverters and a 45MW / 136.24MWh BESS — for partner Super Energy, a Thai renewable energy and independent power producer (IPP) company. While the location and name of the project were not provided in Sungrow’s release a few days ago, some details were offered of its business model and the applications the combination of solar with BESS will achieve. Super Energy’s president described it as a big step in technology to provide the Thai people with solar power 24/7. The development of the plant is in line with Thailand National 4.0 Strategy, a set of programmes by the government to raise economic prosperity, equitable social development, education and environmental protection in a fourth industrial revolution.
Sungrow noted that the Thai government has accepted that energy storage is vital to making renewable energy sources reliable and dispatchable. This led Sungrow and Super Energy, already partnered on several renewable energy projects in Southeast Asia, to proceed with the new plant’s development. The facility will also benefit from the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand’s SPP Hybrid Firm Power Purchasing Programme, which was introduced in 2017. The scheme introduced a competitive bidding process for renewable power plants that could sell electricity to the grid in both a “firm period” from 9am to 10pm and a “non-firm period” from 10pm to 9am. While many biomass projects bid into the auctions, renewables backed with storage were also eligible to compete for 300MW of capacity from power plants between 10MW and 50MW capacity each. Sungrow, which launched its energy storage system (ESS) solutions business globally in 2016 as a partnership with battery maker Samsung SDI, said it will supply its advanced liquid cooled ESS to the project.