Introduce yourself and your company

My name is Belén Linares, I am the Manager of Energy Innovation at Acciona and I have been working in the energy sector for over 20 years. I initially worked in the aerospace sector, because I am an aerospace engineer, but I was amazed by the energy sector very quickly.

My company is Acciona and I work in the energy division where I lead Innovation. Acciona is an electric company whose energy division has more than 11 GW installed worldwide of renewable technologies; it is a green utility: wind, photovoltaic, solar thermal, hydraulic and biomass.

What activities do you carry out in relation to energy storage?

Within the energy innovation portfolio, we work on several strategic programs, one of which is energy storage; we are obsessed with managing energy over time. In principle, we are working with electrochemical storage, or we are starting to bet on it, but we are also monitoring and observing thermal storage, and we are starting to be tremendously interested in stationary storage through gas storage.

What would you highlight about CIC energiGUNE? 

Within Acciona´s innovation strategy, we work in an open innovation mode, which means that we monitor, accelerate, and follow all technology centers or partners that innovate and are excellent at doing what they do, such as CIC energiGUNE in the case of energy storage.

CIC energiGUNE is one of the technology centers in the world that we monitor from Acciona and in which we try to accelerate all those developments of very low TRL´s but that could have some application in the industry.

What is Acciona´s relationship with the Spin off Bcare?

We began our energy storage development by piloting two plants in Spain -our prototypes-, one with solar-photovoltaic and the other with wind power, and we chose CIC energiGUNE´s spin-off, Bcare, as the company to advise Acciona on the development of energy storage.

Now, we are going to invest in a utility-scale energy storage plant in Australia, in the Mortlake Park, with wind energy and Bcare is one of the technological agents that is advising us, for sizing, maintenance, construction and also for the suppliers of the value.