Inverter Maker Ingeteam Equips Spain’s 1st Solar+Storage System

Spanish inverter manufacturer Ingeteam recently revealed that the company was chosen by electric utility Iberdrola to be its technology partner for the purpose of equipping its solar plant at the Campo Arañuelo photovoltaic complex, Spain, with a battery energy storage system solution.

The 40 MW Arañuelo III photovoltaic plant is already in operation, reportedly the first large-scale photovoltaic plant in Spain that incorporates a 3MW / 9MWh battery storage system. This solar plant is part of the Campo Arañuelo photovoltaic complex, developed by Iberdrola in the Almaraz region of Extremadura and made up of the Arañuelo I, II and III solar plants, with a total installed capacity of 143 MW.

Ingeteam has carried out a turnkey supply of the storage system for this plant. “The company has supplied lithium-ion batteries, the integration of the batteries in 45-foot containers, converters, the SCADA monitoring system, civil works, the field assembly of the storage system and its subsequent start-up,” said Ingeteam in an official statement.

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In addition, Ingeteam has also taken charge of supplying the digital protection and control system for the Arañuelo III substation, said the company. The scope includes systems that are responsible for controlling and protecting the plant’s energy evacuation line, the 30/132kV step-up transformer, the collector circuits and the storage system connection circuit, providing the CORE renewables control center with information and real-time access to any of the elements.

A new battery converter

“In addition to being the first large-scale solar plant to incorporate batteries in Spain, this project has an additional novelty, and that is that the battery storage system has been included within the photovoltaic plant in a distributed manner and following a DC- Coupling or coupling in direct current,” claims Ingeteam.

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In this mode, the batteries are installed inside the solar field and the battery converters share the direct current connection with the photovoltaic inverters, which, according to the company, has the following main technical advantages:

• Possibility of taking advantage of the extra power of the photovoltaic panels that is not used in the hours of maximum production (Clipping Recapture).
• It allows to minimize the losses when charging the batteries from the photovoltaic field since the connection between the panels and the batteries passes only through the DC/DC converter. Discharging is also more efficient, since a power transformer is saved compared to the AC-connected solution.

Ingeteam states that hybridizing photovoltaic generation with energy storage in batteries has been carried out using the inverter maker’s new battery converter: the INGECON SUN STORAGE Power DC-DC series.

This converter works through being coupled with the direct current input of a photovoltaic inverter, thus obtaining in practice a hybrid central inverter with direct connection to both photovoltaic panels and batteries, and with a single alternating current output to connect to the LV/MV transformer, the company explains.