July 28, 2022: Polish state energy firm PGE has received a preliminary licence from regulators to build a 200MW battery storage facility in the country as part of a commercial hybrid energy storage (CHEST) project, the company said on July 20.
PGE did not disclose investment costs or the proposed schedule for the lithium ion project — for which it said it is applying for funding in Europe and “looking for business partners to co-finance the investment”.
However, the company said the battery facility would have a nominal capacity of up to 205MW/820MWh and would be integrated with the 716MW Żarnowiec pumped storage power station in northern Poland, creating a “921MW innovative hybrid installation with a capacity of over 4.6GWh”.
The facility will have the capacity to supply power to around 200,000 homes (with an average load of 5kW per household) for at least five hours, PGE said.
PGE said: “CHEST may also prove helpful in increasing the energy security of Poland and the Baltic States.
“It will also have an impact on the competitiveness of energy markets and the synchronization of the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian power systems with the system of continental Europe through the Harmony Link project, which is an electricity interconnector between Lithuania and Poland. The link will connect the Lithuanian and Polish electricity system via a 330km submarine cable between the Żarnowiec and Dorbian substations in Lithuania.”
PGE chief executive officer Wojciech Dąbrowski said the firm’s energy storage goal was to have 800MW of installed capacity in Poland by 2030.