Hitachi Energy officially launched yesterday, rebranded from Hitachi ABB Power Grids, the business Japanese tech company Hitachi acquired an 80.1% stake in, in July 2020.
Bringing together the expertise of Swiss engineering company ABB and Hitachi’s digital technologies, Hitachi Energy is headquartered in Zurich and has the mission of “advancing a sustainable energy future for all”.
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While it will focus on a whole energy system approach for the utility, industrial and infrastructure sectors, including HVDC interconnections, through its grid edge solutions like microgrids and energy storage it will further support energy system flexibility and the growth of renewables.
“At Hitachi Energy, we have pioneered many of the technologies needed for advancing a sustainable energy future for all, including our portfolio of grid edge solutions,” Maxine Ghavi, senior VP and head of Grid Edge Solutions at Hitachi Energy told Energy-Storage.news.
“Our energy storage plus intelligent control, energy management, and digital technologies play a key role in supporting the entire electrical system and to maximise the use of renewables.”
The company produces a battery storage solution called Powerstore which operates in concert with the Grid Edge Solutions e-mesh digital controls platform.
Meanwhile parent company Hitachi said ongoing digitalisation of the energy sector will allow it to use its asset performance management platform, called Lumada, to overcome the complexity and challenges of integrating higher shares of renewables into the world’s energy mix.
Electricity will be the ‘backbone of the entire energy system’
With electricity expected to be the “backbone of the entire energy system” as electrification gathers pace and demand nearly doubles by 2050, Hitachi Energy will work in areas from utilities and renewables to transportation and industry, and data centres and smart city solutions, Ghavi said.
“We believe that there are many pathways toward a carbon-neutral future – and they are all needed to tackle this global challenge of our times – inclusively and equitably,” Ghavi said.
Recent projects awarded to the company reported by Energy-Storage.news include Singapore’s first-ever virtual power plant and a solar-plus-storage microgrid at a coal mine in Indonesia and a 214MW mixed generation technology industrial microgrid in Thailand.
The company signed a partnership in April to collaborate on battery storage for renewables projects in the Americas with Atlas Renewable Energy, a developer, builder, financier and operator of clean energy projects in Latin America.
In Europe, it has been awarded a 90MW battery energy storage system (BESS) project at a nuclear power plant in Finland and supplied power equipment to a recently completed demonstration project combining lead-acid and lithium-ion BESS at a wind farm in Poland.
In 2018, Hitachi ABB Power Grids delivered the first BESS that provides synthetic inertia to stabilise the grid in Australia, at the end of a long transmission line in a remote region of South Australia with utility-scale wind and rooftop solar resources that need integrating.
