State-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is building Asia’s first “virtual power plant,” which would be capable of producing 15 megawatts of electricity per second, the company said yesterday.
The project is expected to come online partially as early as the end of this year, Taipower said in a statement.
A virtual power plant is a network of decentralized units that can aggregate and distribute power as supply and demand fluctuate. Virtual power plants already operate in the US, Europe and Australia.
Virtual power plants create power by storing excess production from solar and wind plants and distributing it when needed, Taipower manager Chang Ting-shu (張廷抒) said.
“If you save some electricity that would have been wasted, that is equivalent to generating that amount of electricity,” Chang said.
The output of solar and wind farms depends on environmental factors rather than demand, and the issue is growing in significance as Taiwan aims to increase the percentage of green power it uses to 20 percent by 2025, Chang said.
“The sun does not shine at night, but you still need power,” he said.
Through a competitive bidding process, Taipower has distributed the project among five Taiwanese companies, which would use batteries from Tesla Inc and Samsung Electronics Co as well as Taiwan’s E-One Moli Energy Corp (能元科技), Taipower said.
The contractors would combine the batteries with automatic frequency control equipment to create systems that would connect to Taipower’s electricity grid to create the virtual power plant, it said.
Taipower historically held a monopoly on power production until 1994, when independent power producers were allowed to join the market. The market was further liberalized in April last year when the Renewable Energy Act (再生能源發展條例) was amended, allowing green energy to be directly traded from independent producers to other businesses.
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