Ukraine launches its first domestically developed industrial energy storage system
Photo: Kness

Serhiy Shakalov and Yevhen Didichenko's Kness Group has completed the construction and launch of eight energy storage parks with a total capacity of over 100 MWh in southern and central Ukraine, according to its website. One of the facilities is a wholly owned development of Kness.

All new facilities are connected to the power grid, certified by the transmission system operator, have acquired the status of electricity market participants and will comprehensively provide services in the frequency support reserve (FSR) and automatic frequency restoration reserve (AFRR) starting from October 1.

Read also
How to make money on energy storage in Ukraine: experience of DTEK, OKKO and Elementum Energy

The group invested about $40 million in the project "using its own, partner and bank financing".

The bulk of energy storage projects are implemented on the basis of technological solutions of the Chinese company HiTHIUM, a global manufacturer of energy storage equipment.

However, one of the projects with a capacity of more than 10 MW was built on Kness's own UPS.

"Four years ago, our RnD team began experimenting with various energy storage technologies, actively working on the architecture and configuration of the energy storage facility and modeling its operation modes in the ancillary services market. As a result, we designed, developed, and manufactured our own technological solution for energy storage," said Didichenko, who is the Director of Business Development at Kness .

The Group has also developed its own energy management system (EMS), which allows to generate trading operations for the EMS facility from a single interface and automatically execute them in accordance with the set parameters.