Major Japanese engineering firm Nippon Koei will be developing two battery energy storage facilities that will be respectively located in the counties of Kent and Hertfordshire in the UK. The company will be developing the two projects through its Dutch subsidiary Nippon Koei Energy Europe (NKEE). Presently, financial close has been reached for the two projects. This news was first reported by Solar Power Portal and other renewable energy news outlets.
NKEE will execute the projects as a one-stop service provider. This means that it will be responsible for planning, development, EPC, and O&M. Each of the two facilities has a storage capacity of 49.5MW.
Besides Nippon Koei, there are also four other Japanese investors that are involved in the two projects: Fuyo General Lease, Tess Engineering, Tokyo Century Corporation, and Toshiba Mitsubishi Electric Industrial Systems Corporation (TMEIC).
The battery energy storage systems of the two projects will be procured by TMEIC, while Nippon Koei will install the battery management systems. Also, Nippon Koei’s other Dutch subsidiary YUSP will “optimize” the operation of the two projects.
Scheduled for completion in the spring of 2023, the two projects are expected to support the mechanisms of the UK power market, such as grid balancing and dynamic containment.
Nippon Koei told Solar Power Portal that the UK power market is “one of the advanced and well-developed markets for energy storage”, so the company will be studying its dynamics in order to facilitate the development of similar projects in Japan and other parts of the world. Earlier in November last year, NKEE and German asset managing firm Aquila Capital jointly acquired a 25MW/100MWh battery energy storage project that is in development in Kluisbergen, a municipality in Belgium. The project is to be completed by the fourth quarter of this year.