OREANDA-NEWS. Hitachi, Ltd., Hitachi Chemical Co., Ltd., Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and The Japan Research Institute, Limited announced that they have been selected by New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) to undertake a feasibility study for a smart grid demonstration project, which is one of NEDO's demonstration project of international energy consumption efficiency technology and system, in the Republic of Poland. Hitachi will handle overall coordination of the demonstration project in its role as research leader, and will participate along with the other three companies in the preliminary survey, which will run from February to November 2015.

The demonstration project is scheduled to run for approximately three years, following a review of the screening committee about the results of this study.

The demonstration project is a joint project between Japan and Poland. It will receive support from the Polish government and include participation by local companies. The preliminary survey will include site selection as well as determining which Polish businesses will participate and the scope of each sub-project.

As a member of the EU, Poland is increasing its wind power generation capacity to meet its ambitious target of supplying 15% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and increasing this to 19% by 2030. Its installed capacity of wind power generation in 2013 was approximately 3.4GW, roughly half the 2020 target of 6.6GW. On the other hand, the country's electricity infrastructure is aging, with more than 50% of it having been constructed more than 40 years ago.

Accordingly, it will be necessary to take steps; including upgrading and enhancing this infrastructure, in order to deal with this problem and to cope with the additional load that the installation of a large amount of wind power generation will impact on the power grid. Since this upgrading and enhancement will require major capital investment and will impose significant management challenges, there is growing interest in the use of Japanese technology for grid stabilization that can maintain reliable grid operation while also minimizing capital investment in parallel with achieving the targets for installing wind and other forms of renewable energy generation.

The demonstration project aims to build grid stabilization control system (SPS) that can both, minimize capital investment in the electricity infrastructure, and maintain stable grid operation at the same time, and to expand the use of renewable energy in Poland by adopting Japan's advanced technology for grid stabilization together with such technologies as energy storage systems and control techniques for the real time curtailment of wind power output. The currently planned activities and participants in the demonstration project are as follows. The actual activities will be determined in more detail during the preliminary survey.