Battery parks are a staple component of the energy system
Power system relying on clean energy sources needs battery power plants - right now and for distant future.
Battery power plants – commonly known as battery parks – equalise frequency fluctuations of the power grid and provide the system with necessary reserves.
Common understanding regarding battery park functionality is simplified: they purchase power when it’s cheap and sell it when it’s expensive. Technically this is true but this so called arbitrage trading consists only a small portion of the whole business model.
Primarily battery power plants are needed on the system level to maintain power grid frequency and function as a reserve in situations where power production or transmission capacity is disturbed. For instance, sea borne cable connections in the Baltic Sea area are vulnerable to this type of disturbance.
Battery power plant sells this capacity to the Nordic reserve market, where national transmission service operators (TSO’s) such as Fingrid procure this reserve.
