With storage units and hybrid plants, the local dispatch centre is no longer only the technical heart of a renewable asset; it has also become the hands of its commercial operation, said Elena Popescu, CEO of Elektra Renewable Support, at Romanian BESS on the Fast Track, a workshop organised by Energynomics. The change raises the bar for the control systems installed with every storage unit.
“The EMS shouldn’t be just a monitoring tool of the storage unit, of the asset,” Elena Popescu said, referring to the energy management system.
Local dispatch centres appeared in Romania with the first wind farms, and the same rules now apply to all renewable capacities and to storage units. Assets in category B, between 1 and 5 MW, must also join a local dispatch centre if they want to provide system services, because they have to be integrated with the transmission system operator (TSO).
Elektra Renewable Support has had to renew the technology of its own dispatch centre roughly every four years as its portfolio grew, Elena Popescu said. The centre started with a single monitor and will probably need another expansion by 2028.
Start from the grid, not from the storage unit
The EMS has to be integrated with the power plant controller, Elena Popescu argued. When monitoring comes from one supplier and the plant controller from another, the asset is harder to operate, and the Romanian market still has to learn to deliver the two together.
“Study first what the grid needs and how the hybrid power plant controller, or the storage unit controller, must react, and go from there,” she said.
The storage unit comes last in that sequence: it has to offer the same functions whether it works on its own or inside a mixed power plant, so the technical solution should not differ between the two cases.
Grid connection: preparation, not limitation
Elena Popescu disputed the view that grid connection is the main operational bottleneck for storage in Romania. The operational limitations, the communication equipment to be installed and the design approvals required are all known from the grid connection agreement, one and a half to two years in advance, she said.
Delays between the end of construction and the first energy sold come from poor preparation and from the number of parties involved in a project, technical or commercial. “If you take exactly the time frames that you have in the law, you cannot have problems,” she said.
For distribution operators, connecting a storage unit is no different from connecting a solar or hybrid plant, because the signals are the same: active and reactive power, main circuit breaker, voltage. Only the TSO needs something more, the battery’s state of charge, to calculate the power available for frequency control.
Romanian BESS on the Fast Track was organised by Energynomics, with the support of our partners: Elektra Renewable Support, ADEX Energy, Adrem Asset Management, BLU Capital, Dongfang Electric, Electroalfa, Enery, Enexus, Gotion, ING Bank, Marsh Romania, Softenerg WEBUS 4 ENERGY.