Europe's largest battery-storage project has been officially opened by Amber Rudd, minister at the Department for Energy and Climate Change at Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, England. S&C Electric Europe, Samsung SDI and Younicos collaborated to deploy the technology onto a United Kingdom Power Networks substation.
The fully automated 6MW/10MWh Smarter Network Storage (SNS) project will assess the role of energy storage in cost-effectively supporting the UK's Carbon Plan, and will save more than £6 million (USD$9.4 million) on traditional network-reinforcement methods. S&C Electric Europe is the lead supplier to the £18.7 million (USD$29.2 million) project, drawing on its extensive experience deploying energy storage projects in the UK and around the world. Berlin-based Younicos contributed custom-built intelligent software architecture and components. By providing frequency regulation as well as load shifting, the project will stabilize the grid more effectively than traditional thermal generators, providing more space on the grid for clean, but intermittent, renewable energies.
"Energy storage can play a major role in balancing the grid as it solves the problem of renewable intermittency by absorbing surplus power and releasing it when needed. This function simultaneously helps to securely balance capacity and supply, and protects the grid from stress events (e.g. power outages)," says Andrew Jones, managing director, S&C Electric Europe. "The introduction of energy storage in substations like the one at Leighton Buzzard can decrease the need and cost of traditional reinforcement, such as transformers and cabling."
"The project will allow us to explore and improve the economics of electrical energy storage, and assess the potential benefits to the electricity system in a number of sustainable and flexible ways. We have also been developing a first-of-its-kind platform to help us optimize and manage a wide range of different services that the storage can provide," adds Ben Wilson, UK Power Networks' director of strategy and regulation and chief financial officer.
The technology can provide a range of benefits to the wider electricity system, including absorbing energy, then releasing it to meet demand, helping to support capacity constraints, and balancing the influx of intermittent and inflexible low carbon technologies onto the grid. The project will explore the capabilities and value in alternative revenue streams for storage, while also deferring expensive conventional reinforcement measures, such as transformers, cable and overhead lines.
The Smarter Network Storage project was awarded funding of £13.2 million (US$20.6 million) by Ofgem in December 2012 under The Low Carbon Networks (LCN) Fund scheme, and will last four years, from January 2013 to December 2016.