First approved by the Scottish Government back in late 2015, Hywind Scotland began generating electricity in October of last year. This week Norwegian energy company Equinor (then known as Statoil) announced that it has completed the installation of the world’s first battery for an offshore wind farm at its 30 megawatt (MW) Hywind Scotland floating offshore wind farm, which is the world’s first floating wind farm.
Even before Hywind was completed and operational, the two companies behind the project — Equinor and Masdar — conceived of plans to add a battery storage option to the project, which would be the first time a battery storage project (known as Batwind) has been attached to an offshore wind energy project.
Equinor revealed that Batwind has been completed and the 1 MW battery provided by Younicos, and located at an onshore substation, will now be able to dynamically balance power from the offshore wind farm.
Batwind is equipped with Younicos intelligent Y.Q software, which ensures that the battery ’learns’ the optimal storage conditions. The software tells the battery when to store electricity and for how long, and when and how much to inject back onto the grid.