The Distribution System Operator of the Electricity Authority of Cyprus has announced that connection terms have been issued for 16 of the 42 applications received for existing photovoltaic systems seeking to incorporate energy storage, with those projects representing a combined installed capacity of 29 MW.
The announcement came in response to a statement by the Competitive Electricity Market Association and sets out the current state of play across a pipeline of applications being processed by both the Distribution System Operator (DSO) and the Cyprus Transmission System Operator (TSO).
The TSO has received 33 separate applications for standalone energy storage systems. However, due to the scale of the projects involved and the high cost of building new transmission substations required to connect them, investor appetite for accepting connection terms has been limited. As a result, those applications have been referred to the DSO to assess the feasibility of connecting part of the requested capacity to the distribution network instead.
The DSO has completed technical and economic studies for six of the 33 referred applications and forwarded them to the TSO for the issuance of connection terms. In five of those cases, applicants have already accepted the final terms, with the projects collectively representing 60 MW of capacity and 190 MWh of storage.
A further 27 applications submitted to the TSO and 26 submitted directly to the DSO, covering existing photovoltaic systems seeking storage integration, remain under evaluation. Many of these involve connections to saturated transmission substations where no available capacity exists for new approvals.
The DSO said it is working to complete the evaluation of all pending applications as quickly as possible, but noted that it is awaiting the Ministry of Energy's publication of maturity criteria for prioritising applications, following a recent amendment to the Electricity Market Regulation Law. Both the DSO and the TSO require those criteria before they can proceed with issuing the necessary connection terms.
Source: CNA
