FRV to add its first battery in Australia with hybrid solar-storage power plant

Solar developer Fotowatio Renewable Ventures has announced plans to build a 5 megawatt solar-storage hybrid power plant near Dalby in southern Queensland, the first time it has built such a facility.

The Dalby Hybrid Power Plant will include 2.4 MW of solar PV capacity, and a 2.5MW/5MWh battery, and is expected to be fully operational by early 2022.

FRV said the power plant would be able to feed into Ergon’s distribution network, as well as take electricity from the grid to charge the battery, allowing it function as “a predictable and dispatchable generation plan”.

It’s the Saudi-owned company’s ninth project in Australia, and the first to include a battery energy storage system. Its existing solar farms run from Winton, Victoria in the South to Clare in northern Queensland, with a total of 640 MW of capacity.

It also has solar farms and batteries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.

Carlo Frigerio, managing director of FRV Australia, said the project would “be critical to Queensland’s future energy supply and security as renewable energy capacity increases, with storage supporting solar and wind-generated power coming into the market when it is most needed”.

“The inclusion of PV as part of the project shows the importance of integrating solar and batteries in order to deliver dispatchable power.”

Felipe Hernandez, global managing director of FRV-X said energy storage played “a central and critical role to fully realise the power of renewable energy, and FRV acknowledges the value of this technology as a key element to achieve a decarbonised society”.

Founded in Spain in 2006, FRV was bought by Saudi Arabian conglomerate Abdul Latif Jameel Group in 2015.

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