POLAND: Traction power supply infrastructure company PKP Energetyka has signed a funding agreement with the Europe’s Rail research partnership.
The funding to support energy-efficiency projects is worth an initial €3·4m in 2023-26 and could be worth a further €5·6m by 2031. This will be co-financed under the European Commission’s Horizon Europe research programme, of which Europe’s Rail is a part.
PKP Energetyka plans to design, implement and maintain energy storage facilities and accompanying infrastructure to enable ‘balanced energy consumption’, the company announced on February 9.
The company intends to use energy storage facilities to enable the development of ‘communities’ across the network where green energy infrastructure can be used both for rail applications and by other consumers.
The funding agreement builds on PKP Energetyka’s ongoing adoption of green energy technology. In 2021, the company built a lithium-ion battery energy storage facility at Garbce, 50 km from Wrocław. This is designed to stabilise the traction electricity supply and allow for more efficient use of renewable energy sources. It contains four battery containers with a total of 4 240 lithium ion cells providing a usable capacity of 1·2 MWh.
‘Together with the energy storage facility in Garbce, which has already been in operation for two years, subsequently built storage facilities will form the basis for the construction of about 300 profiled and customised ecosystems of this kind in Poland’, said Piotr Obrycki, director of Research and Development Office at PKP Energetyka in response to the funding agreement.
- PKP Energetyka announced on February 13 that it had completed the roll-out of 360 ‘green substations’ over the past 18 months. It has fitted a total of 11 000 m2 of photovoltaic panels which have the potential to generate nearly 2 GWh of clean energy per year, the company said. This should enable it to reduce its carbon footprint by more than 1 500 tonnes per year.
