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Madrid, Spain — GAS NATURAL FENOSA and TOSHIBA Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) today announced that they will carry out collaborative on-site verification testing program of the transportable lithium-ion Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) manufactured by TOSHIBA. The goal of BESS is to provide a solution for the achievement of an efficient, reliable and stable distribution network.

The demonstration program was launched in Dec. 2013 and will run for five years. It is supported by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development organization (NEDO), under its program for "Development of Large Scale Energy Storage System with High Safety and Cost Competitiveness."

The demonstration will initially be located at the Alcalá de Henares distribution substation in the suburbs of Madrid, but it is planned to carry out demonstrations at several sites during the program lifetime to fully assess the various case studies. The scope of the testing program will include the evaluation of the BESS’s effectiveness in contributing to peak shaving and the ability of the transportable BESS to manage the electric supply at specific sites with seasonal or temporary high electricity demand. In addition, management of power and voltage fluctuations caused by renewable energy sources will be evaluated. The demonstration equipment consists in a transportable BESS with 500kW output and 776kWh capacity.

GAS NATURAL FENOSA (GNF) is one of the leading multinational companies in the gas and electricity sector; it operates in 25 countries and has around 20 million customers. The utility operates electric distribution networks in Spain, Panama, Colombia and Moldavia. GNF manages electrical power supply with seasonal and occasional electrical demand fluctuation. In addition, the rapid increase of renewable energy and distributed generation will demand more flexibility in the electric system. For those applications, storage technologies are the promising solution that can be integrated in the different electrical systems.

TOSHIBA is one of the largest world-wide electronics and electrical equipment manufacturers and is promoting wide spread of the BESS using Toshiba’s advanced SCiBTM lithium-ion secondary batteries. The SCiBTM has excellent features such as safe, long life for more than 10,000 charge-and-discharge cycles, high effective capacity and low-temperature operation. Those features are highly suited for the BESS applied to distribution networks.

Through the demonstration program, GNF and TOSHIBA aim to demonstrate the distributed BESS solutions that will contribute to the establishment of highly reliable metropolitan distribution networks that can ensure stable electric power supply for those with large amounts of renewable energy sources and also provide continuous power supply solutions in metropolitan areas in the event of an emergency situation.