According to foreign media reports, the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy of South Africa recently issued a request for proposals for six battery energy storage projects, with a scale of 513MW/2052MWh, and the bidding deadline is July this year.

The ministry's request for proposals, which was issued on March 7, 2023, focuses on the deployment of battery energy storage projects for five substations operated by grid operator Eskom. Eskom will purchase the electricity stored in these battery energy storage projects. for July 5, 2023.

These energy storage projects deployed in various substations are the Aggeneis project, Ferrum project, Garona, Mookodi project and Nieuwehoop project, all of which are deployed in the Northern Cape.

The projects will provide capacity, energy and ancillary services to Eskom's grid, in particular transient reserve, regulation reserve and supplementary reserve services.

The duration of these battery energy storage projects is 4 hours, which means that the total energy storage capacity is slightly higher than 2GWh, and the charging and discharging efficiency is required to reach more than 70%. Lithium-ion batteries are typically in the 90% range, so this requirement may open up bidding opportunities for other battery products.

The battery storage projects will be required to perform up to 730 charges and discharges per year, which means an average of two charges per day and an availability of 95% throughout the year.

South Africa's ruling African National Congress party tweeted last month that it would launch the tender, one of several major tenders by Eskom seeking energy storage to support grid stability.

South Africa is working towards a net-zero electricity system by 2050, but more pressing is the need to eliminate widespread and frequent grid outages.

In August 2022, the grid operator completed the procurement of around 343MW/1440MWh of battery storage systems, and began deploying some of these battery storage systems late last year. This is in line with the 146MWh tender issued in December 2022.

Norwegian renewable energy developer Scatec has started construction on three battery storage projects with a total storage capacity of 1,140MWh.Editor / He Yurong