Solar farm with 3.6-MWh sodium-sulfur BESS up and running in Mongolia

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Mongolian government have inaugurated a 5-MW solar PV farm hybridised with a 3.6-MWh battery energy storage system (BEES) in Zavkhan province, Mongolia, the bank said on Monday.

The hybrid, which also includes an advanced energy management system running in Zavkhan’s capital of Uliastai, is fully grid-connected and ready to service mostly rural areas in the western part of the country. The plant will generate around 8,800 MWh of solar power and 1,300 MWh of charged and discharged energy in the Altai-Uliastai energy system, the ADB said.

The BESS is a sodium-sulfur type of battery, which is better suited for Mongolia’s harsh winters.

The facilities came out of the ADB’s Upscaling Renewable Energy Sector Project as one of the programme’s sub-projects. The ADB approved the overall project in September 2018, committing loan financing towards the development of 41 MW of distributed renewable energy systems across several power and heat sub-projects in the less developed region of western Mongolia. The Strategic Climate Fund and the Japan Fund for the Joint Crediting Mechanism (JFJCM) contributed grant co-financing.

The Uliastai solar-plus-storage hybrid sub-project was co-financed with a USD-6-million (EUR 5.8m) grant from the JFJCM.

“Thanks to this project, more than 48,000 consumers of more than 8,000 households in Altai-Uliastai region will receive clean and reliable energy,” said Byekbolat Khalik, the head of renewable energy division of Mongolia’s ministry of energy.

(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.965)

Choose your newsletter by Renewables Now. Join for free!