Seated from left to right: Dr. Rainer Pflaum, CFO TransnetBW, Dr. Werner Götz, CEO TransnetBW, Pascal Daleiden, Country Managing Director Hitachi Energy Austria, Germany and Switzerland, and Stefan Habild, Business Unit Manager Grid Integration, Hitachi Energy Germany AG. Image courtesy Hitachi Energy
As renewable energy supply increases in droves and grid stability becomes an ever more pertinent issue, Germany’s state-owned TSO TransnetBW has signed a major order with Hitachi Energy for new grid stabilising technologies.
The Swiss energy tech giant will supply two Enhanced STATCOM1 stations with the grid stabilisation tech SVC Light Enhanced, to enable TransnetBW to improve power quality in the transmission grid, which supplies power to 11 million people and numerous industries.
The order comes in after successful negotiations between TransnetBW and Hitachi Energy, with the latter being commissioned to build innovative tech, which TransnetBW refers to as the STATCOM-GFM systems, at the substations in Wendlingen and Oberjettingen.
The new solution combines two power quality and grid stabilisation technologies in a single compact device, states Hitachi Energy in a release.
Using power electronics, it integrates the efficient reactive power compensation of SVC Light with supercapacitors, otherwise known as supercaps, which are electronic devices that absorb and inject active power into the grid in milliseconds.
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In a TransnetBW-issued statement, they state how Static Synchronous Compensators (STATCOMs) act as a power converter in pulse operation that can use reactive power to raise or lower the voltage as required.
The TSO says that this will be essential for energy supply because power lines must be constantly live to be able to transport alternating current.
However, until now, the generators of large power plants have provided the network-forming properties necessary for safe network operation.
Since these are being replaced by renewables as part of the energy transition, TransnetBW has had to look at new technologies, which is where the deal with Hitachi Energy comes in.
The planned STATCOM GFM can also provide active power to the network for a period of a few seconds, referred to as instantaneous reserve. GFM stands for “Gridforming” and expands conventional STATCOM to include these network-forming properties.
According to Hitachi Energy, advanced control features like GFM provide significant improvements over previous solutions and make this technology less sensitive to future changes in the network.
The provision of instantaneous reserves is made possible by the short-term energy storage from supercaps; if there is an imbalance between production and consumption, the short-term energy storage can feed in or out energy at short notice and thus stabilise the network.
“The STATCOM is the Spiderman of reactive power compensation systems: It can do everything, is super fast, extremely flexible and the spider in the web,” says Lukas Kaiser, project manager at TransnetBW, describing the planned system.
Added Niklas Persson, managing director of Hitachi Energy’s Grid Integration business: “With power networks evolving rapidly, we are committed to helping our customers and countries transition toward a carbon-neutral energy future and providing future-proof solutions that will offer the flexibility needed to adapt to changing grid conditions.”
Construction of the new tech is scheduled to start in 2025 and the systems are scheduled to go into operation in 2028.
Looking at the schedule, Dr Werner Götz, CEO of TransnetBW commented: “For us, the implementation of the STATCOM-GFM systems is another milestone in ensuring safe and reliable network operation in the future.”
