Integration of Renewable Energies: An Experimental Site to Tackle the Challenges of Hybrid Power

Renewable energies: an experimental site to tackle the challenges of hybrid power!

Location: Risø Hybrid Power Plant – DTU-TotalEnergies Excellence Center for Clean Energy (DTEC), Denmark

Marie-Noëlle Semeria, Senior Vice President, R&D Lines, TotalEnergies: The Hybrid Power Plant, is a fundamental part of our research strategy. It's where experimentation provides absolutely vital input that validates our modeling work.

Julien Cabrera, Head of R&D Hybrid & Storage Program, TotalEnergies: The pilot you see here is the HPP (Hybrid Power Plant). It’s about integrating a certain number of technologies to understand the issues of hybridization. Behind me are two Vestas wind turbines. There are 330 kW of solar panels. There's a Saft battery container. All that will be integrated in the HPP experimental lab, which will also be equipped with control technologies, and grid emulation to create microgrid situations that you get on our sites.

Kaushik Das, Associate Professor, Scientific Director, Hybrid, Storage & Grid, DTU: This is a unique research facility globally because of the scale. It's not so big that you cannot control and test different methods, but it's also not as small as lab scale. Having a real facility like this, we can create real grid faults, and then we can see how the renewable assets or Hybrid Power Plant can react to those and support the grid for the future green transition.

Mark Been, Vice President R&D Line Power, TotalEnergies: The Hybrid Power Plant is going to be used to perform all the experiments in order to understand and to define better protection algorithms when we bring in huge capacity of renewable energy There's a lot of interaction, with lots of energy losses, where we need to be better at mobilization and designing the plants, as we would like also to investigate all the different forms of flexibility by using batteries. We are very thrilled to work with the Danish Technical University, one of the most respectable entities in the electricity world, and, of course, recognized worldwide for its wind technology. The DTEC collaboration we have is not only about the HPP. It is much wider. We talk about electricity, we talk about wind, and we talk potentially also about future energies.

Julien Cabrera: It's a partnership between industry and academia because academics will obviously be very good at the theory but you're always best when trying to solve a specific problem. The advantage of TotalEnergies is that we have the sites already, so problems they can work on. So the research is guided.

Kaushik Das: As a researcher, I am very much looking forward to new problems coming up, which I'll get to solve in the future. When we work with TotalEnergies, we get to see the fulfilment of our research, and that’s very satisfying as a researcher.

Marie-Noëlle Semeria: TotalEnergies' R&D is very open. This is open innovation. About 40% of our resources are with our partners. The Danish Technical University has major competencies. The big subject we're waiting for today is GREAT, a scientific and technical program for the Hybrid pilot.

Beste Erel, GREAT Project Leader, TotalEnergies: GREAT stands for Grid Enhancement for Ancillaries in Tomorrow's Power System. And during this project, we will try to understand how we can foresee the flexibility needed in the European grid. It's very important to be able to benefit from the Hybrid Power Plant facility, here in DTU Campus, to be able to validate our models and to understand if we are able to test the experimental capability of the different assets.

Julien Cabrera: In such a complex challenge as the energy transition, our role as researchers is to find the right angles, the right solutions, that will give us safe, affordable and sustainable energy.

Mark Been: The thing is, there’s still so much to do in terms of managing the grids in Europe. A lot of countries have their own grids, how to interconnect it and with the increase of renewable energy, grid stability has become a major issue. So we need to be there, in this transition, at the forefront on making sure that we can deliver the electrons.