Cuerva and ZGR Corporación join forces to provide energy support to rural areas

The agreement involves joint development of technological projects aimed at improving the electrical infrastructure of rural populations in Andalusia.

The alliance seeks to provide support to address contingencies and disruptions in the network and to develop integrated applications that contribute to its stability, all aimed at fostering electrification of the isolated communities for which Cuerva is the distributor.

Today, Cuerva and ZGR Corporación entered into an agreement aimed at providing energy support to rural areas in the province of Granada. It involves installation of a lithium battery-based storage system.

The agreement, expected to last for one year, is aimed at developing the aforesaid system to improve the area’s electric power supply. Accordingly, new power electronics solutions will be implemented to foster installation of smart grids, the use of clean technologies and state-of-the-art electrical equipment such as smart rectifiers and chargers that ensure a high-quality power supply to address regulatory changes and new energy consumption profiles.

The ultimate challenge is to avoid investment in new electrical networks while providing existing infrastructures with greater flexibility to ensure that they can provide a reliable power supply in the event of contingencies in urban areas, mainly during the summer. Other objectives include improving production while reducing the infrastructures’ management costs and their environmental impact.

To be more specific, Cuerva's network operation team has selected a transformer substation (TS) in the town of Jayena for installation of a battery. Since it is located a considerable distance from the distribution substation, the grid voltage suffers variations depending on the time of day, making it an ideal facility in which to deploy the storage system to flatten the power curve by injecting both active and reactive voltage into the network to prevent consumers from suffering the effects of the aforesaid fluctuations.

Batteries, apart from compensating for the grid’s voltage variations, serves another very important purpose; it can work in “island mode”. As its name suggests, this means that in the event of a grid failure, the battery has the capacity to autonomously provide power to the district for at least two hours, thus allowing time to repair the network and resume supply from the grid. In conclusion, a storage system is cleaner, more cost-effective and more efficient than the construction of traditional assets such as new transmission cables.

According to Íñigo Segura, Managing Director of ZGR: “At a time of rapid transformation of the energy sector when electrification of the economy is a crucial economic parameter, this collaboration agreement is evidence of how cooperation between different agents in the electricity value chain is vital to the energy transition.“

Ignacio Cuerva, CEO of Cuerva, states that “the agreement is the result of preliminary work by the technical teams of the two companies in which synergies between their business cultures and niches were identified. ZGR's power electronics expertise combined with Cuerva's knowledge of the electricity market in the urban areas will undoubtedly enable the development of services and solutions with added value for network users.”

“For a distributor, network storage systems must be fully integrated components to ensure safe, reliable operation of the distribution network. Only in this way can we avoid constructing electrical infrastructures with greater environmental impact,” adds Juan Guerrero, Cuerva’s Network Services Manager.

Cuerva distributes more than 100 GWh of energy per year to supply roughly 50,000 people with a reliable power supply. To optimise the supply and maintain its high quality levels, Cuerva works with a data volume of 5,100 GB integrated into its systems that enables smart-grid management in real-time. Furthermore, our extensive track record, significant investment and constant innovation in our distribution areas are reflected in our fully-integrated electrical generation and distribution infrastructures: 3 substations, 450 smart transformer substations, 400 km of HV lines and more than 500 km of LV lines.

ZGR Corporación has been designated as the main supplier of direct-current chargers for Iberdrola and Unión Fenosa Distribución. They have also been awarded the fourth BESS project with Viesgo this year. All this means that they are a leading domestic manufacturer of direct-current equipment.