South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co. has won a series of energy storage system (ESS) orders from home and abroad, gaining further traction in this rapidly burgeoning market.

The country’s largest power plant equipment maker said Sunday it signed an ESS contract with SK E&S, a Korean gas and power company. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ESS allows large plants to save power consumption by storing energy during times of low demand at night and using it during the day at peak demand.

Doosan Heavy would design and construct a 70 megawatt-hour capacity ESS while SK E&S would be in charge of investment and operations of the system. Doosan Heavy aims to set up the ESS by September.

Together with SK E&S, it also plans to set up a factory energy management system and a solar power plant to operate under a microgrid system, a localized power grid integrating renewable energy and other energy sources to run independently or as part of the area’s main electrical grid.

Separately, Doosan GridTech, a U.S. subsidiary of Doosan Heavy, last month inked a deal with Consumers Energy, Michigan’s largest energy provider, to build an ESS at an electrical substation in the southwestern city of Kalamazoo. It plans to complete the project on an engineering, procurement & construction basis by September. Consumers Energy is a public utility that provides natural gas and electricity to 6.6 million of Michigan’s 10 million residents.

According to market research firm MarketsandMarkets, the global battery energy storage market is expected to grow from $1.98 billion in 2018 to $8.54 billion by 2023, at a compound annual growth rate of 33.9 percent. Increasing demand for grid-connected solutions and falling prices of lithium-ion batteries, which are used to power the storage systems, are cited as major drivers for the market growth.

By Woo Je-yoon and Kim Hyo-jin

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