On Friday, Eskom unveiled a first-of-its-kind Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) project in Worcester.
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The Bess substation will operate at the Hex Substation near Worcester. The Hex River Power Station was originally built by Eskom to provide power for 314km along the main railway line between Bellville and Tows River, and later a further 288km to Beaufort West.
The Hex BESS is the first project to be completed under Eskom’s flagship BESS project, which was announced in July 2022 to help alleviate the pressure on the national electricity grid. The project also forms part of the state utility’s Generation Recovery Plan which started in 2023 and is aimed at achieving an energy availability factor of 70% by the end of March 2025.
According to the state-owned power supplier, the Hex BESS uses large-scale utility batteries with a total capacity of 1 440MWh per day and a 60MW PV capacity. It was specifically designed to store 100MWh of energy – enough to power an entire town such as Mossel Bay or Howick for five hours.
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Eskom plans to install about 833MWh of additional storage capacity at eight distribution sites in KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, the Western Cape and the Northern Cape. This phase also includes about 2MW of solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity.
‘We are pioneering the implementation of the BESS technology, serving as a large-scale commercial project to validate the technology’s feasibility and benefits,’ says Velaphi Ntuli, Eskom’s general manager of distribution and operations enablement. ‘The successful implementation will pave the way for wider adoption and possible export of the technology to other regions beyond the borders of South Africa.’
During construction, the Hex BESS site created 250 jobs for local community members, supported 12 early childhood centres with playground and educational materials, a donation of computers and 500 school uniforms. Further to this, other corporate social investment projects will be completed before the end of March 2024.
Once the first phase of the project is complete, Eskom will install an additional 144MW of storage capacity, equivalent to 616MWh at four Eskom distribution sites and one transmission site. For this phase, the solar PV capacity will be 58MW.
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Picture: Eskom