- Hydroelectric capacity has historically provided Sweden’s balancing needs.
- Ingrid Capacity is a much newer company founded just last year.
Its hydroelectric capacity has historically provided Sweden’s balancing needs. In an interview conducted at the Energy Storage Summit, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) Nicklas Backer of Ingrid Capacity said there was around 70MW online by the end of last year, meaning the market could as much as quadruple in size this year.
He added that “A lot of the turbines for hydro in Sweden are old and are not built or optimised for some of the fast response services needed in today’s system. Overall the relative amount of hydro is decreasing too – the absolute amount is flat, maybe even falling slightly. Some small-scale hydro is getting stopped because of environmental permitting.”
Ingrid Capacity is a much newer company, having been founded just last year. But it has already grown to have the “leading project pipeline within the Nordics as far as we know”, Bäcker said, “In the Nordics, you have a binary situation where you have DSOs (distribution system operators) that are more or less doing fine on capacity, and then you have just one or two industrial users all of a sudden causing capacity constraints.”