Developer NGEN is deploying the largest battery energy storage systems (BESS) in Slovenia, Austria and Croatia, and wants to take its model beyond CEE too, CEO and co-founder Roman Bernard said.
The Slovenia-headquartered company was recently in the news for a 20MWh project it commissioned in Austria, which is the country’s largest, and it is deploying the largest battery storage systems in neighbouring Slovenia and Croatia, totalling 70MW/140MWh and 50MW/100MWh respectively.
The Slovenia project builds on three it already has operational there, totalling 20MWh, 30MWh and 40MWh, the first of which was built in 2019. These projects mainly provide secondary reserve ancillary services and cover 50-80% of the country’s need there, Bernard told Energy-Storage.news.
The strategy of NGEN is to deploy both large-scale and small-scale energy storage projects and aggregate them into virtual power plants (VPP), combining their respective capabilities to provide a maximum array of services to the grid. It has its own home energy storage solution, NGEN Star, as well as its own smart meters.
Bernard describes NGEN as a hybrid independent power producer and software company controlling the VPP. Its proprietary software platform is ESGP (Energy Smart Grid Platform), which manages the various assets in its electricity network and is the core of the business.
The company has so far been building up its portfolio using private capital rather than institutional lenders or investors, Bernard said. It has used Tesla’s grid-scale BESS product for all its projects so far.
Other than the three countries above, NGEN is also targeting Germany, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
“In three years, we aim to have 1-2GW of grid-scale capacity, 2-3GW in total including smaller systems, and be present in 5-6 countries,” Bernard said.
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