GE Renewable Energy has been selected by Wykes to deliver a 25MW multiple hour duration Energy Storage System, to be integrated with Wykes’ solar PV plant at the Chelveston Renewable Energy Park, UK.

The site currently operates with 60MW of solar energy and 26MW of wind energy, featuring GE’s 2.85MW onshore wind turbines. Wykes will use GE’s Reservoir Energy Storage technology to add another 60MW of solar capacity, for a total of 120MW of solar and 146MW from the park.

The Storage system will be the UK’s first direct-DC-coupled solar deployment where the solar panels and the batteries will share a common set of power conversion equipment. This will help improve the overall energy output of the solar-storage hybrid system while optimizing costs and increasing the overall system reliability and flexibility.

This represents UK’s first DC-Coupled Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) integrated with a solar plant.

With the reservoir energy storage system Wykes has full flexibility for today’s market circumstances and future market dynamics. It allows Wykes to fully optimise the energy they generate on-site, as well as optimize their grid connection and flexibility to choose how and when the energy generated is used.

Scott Coleman, process and controls engineering manager, Wykes Engineering Ltd said: “As part of our ongoing relationship with GE Renewable Energy, we selected their power storage system as it was flexible, scalable and allowed us to perform a range of tasks enabling us to provide resilient services, not only to the National Grid, but to our Private energy consumers within our expanding on-site Grid.”

Prakash Chandra, renewable hybrids CEO, GE Renewable Energy, said: “The world is increasingly moving to generate more dispatchable renewables using hybrid solutions – combining the power of standalone technologies like wind and solar with storage through controls and software, and, this project is a further demonstration of GE’s capabilities in this space. We are proud to have been selected by Wykes to deliver this flagship project in the UK and for the opportunity to deliver on this challenging solution.”

The UK Government recently announced that it will make it easier to construct projects to store renewable energy from solar and wind farms across the UK as part of its efforts to reduce greenhouse gases by 2050.

There is currently 4GW of storage projects in planning which could power a combined 6 million homes in the UK, in addition to the 1GW of battery storage already in operation.