Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa), has commissioned the Middle Eastern country’s first ever megawatt-scale battery storage system in time to measure the pilot project’s effectiveness at dealing with peak demand in summer.
The state-owned electricity and water company announced last week that the deployment and grid connection of a 1MW / 4MWh Tesla Powerpack battery energy storage system (BESS) had been completed “ahead of schedule and beginning operations to benefit from it during the summer period,” during which Qatar’s energy demand is at its seasonal highest.
This was despite “many challenges” that a team of “young Qatari personnel” had to overcome during the project’s execution, Kahramaa said, particularly around managing and training workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pilot project could prove to be important in the Gulf State if successful, with the electricity and water supplier and regulator investigating whether the technology and its applications could be scaled up to be used at high-load substations in the country’s electricity network, and could also be integrated with large-scale renewable energy projects including the 800MW solar PV project Al Kharsaah near Qatar’s capital Doha which was tendered for and got a then-record low-price tariff in January.
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