Zigor

Recent breakthroughs in power electronics have made energy storage solutions more reliable and cost-effective than they were ever before. In particular, advances in the integration and engineering of battery energy storage systems (BESS) have made it suitable for various applications within multiple parts of the power generation and distribution process. Despite this potential, its effective operation relies on how well the battery is managed. This is where an efficient battery management system steps into the picture. It helps energy companies in safeguarding and monitoring the status and health of the BESS and allows them to take preventive and corrective measures accordingly. Against this backdrop, energy companies are in search of energy storage solutions that come with effective battery management systems, which will help them achieve consistent power supply and reduce maintenance overheads. Zigor, a leading power transmission and distribution solutions provider based in Spain that delivers state-of-the-art energy storage solutions—Zigor ESS—with integrated three-phase battery management systems to manage the battery’s charging and discharging processes and status.

The company exhibits extensive knowledge and experience in battery management for industrial UPS systems, hybrid generation inverters, and battery chargers. “With a greater emphasis on design, Zigor’s battery management systems tick all boxes: high power backup, peak shaving, load displacements, and other functions required to foster stability in the electrical network,” states Eneko Mardones, CTO of Zigor. With such robust battery management systems, Zigor ESS has more than 98 percent performance credibility and a total harmonic distortion (THD) of less than three percent.
Making it all possible is the company’s talented R&D team with a solid background in power electronics. The company’s numerous patents only highlight their technical mastery. Recently, the company patented a concept that allows the integration of Zigor ESS together with other solutions without damaging the stability of the grid. With a competent team of experienced professionals, Zigor has scripted success for a multitude of energy companies. In one instance, Iberdrola, a Spanish multinational electric utility company, installed three energy storage systems, including Zigor ESS, to analyse and test the coexistence and stability of these systems. The result of the project positioned Zigor ESS as the best solution from a technical point of view by assessing its higher power density and the best performance in terms of stability and integration with the other solutions.

While the emergence of such digital technologies in the storage systems has rocked the energy landscape, the challenge is to justify a client’s investment in energy storage solutions. This is because many of the services the storage systems can offer are not regulated by any legislation.
To that end, Zigor works hand-in-hand with the associations to which the company is affiliated to try to establish new rules of the game that increase the profitability of these solutions.

Zigor also specialises in delivering power generation and distribution solutions based on photovoltaic technology, for both on-grid and off-grid systems. Zigor’s broad portfolio of power generation solutions even includes the supply of critical auxiliary and control equipment in electric distribution equipment and high-quality electrical power supply to industries. Besides, in the field of isolated power generation, the company offers hybrid inverters that are capable of automatically managing photovoltaic resources and energy storage in batteries.

Currently, Zigor is developing new functionalities for power converters in storage systems—based on their vast experience and client feedback—that will enable better integration into the distribution grids. Through this development, Zigor also aims to contribute to fault clearing during an event of grid failure, communication and synchronisation with control centers, and the reservation of energy for grid maintenance operations. In this pursuit, Mardones believes that technology adoption needs be as fast as technology development in order to make the business profitable. “To achieve this, Zigor keeps an innovation strategy based on three horizons: keeping a good balance between the short term and fast product development, creating new products, and integrating avant-garde technologies,” informs Mardones. With such an appetite for innovation, the company is poised to take the energy landscape by storm.