Engineering news
A £2 million laboratory that will enable researchers to test smart grid technology has been launched at Newcastle University.
The Smart Grid Laboratory, which has been jointly by Siemens Energy Automation Division and the university, will enable experts to test worst case scenarios in real-time without any risk to customers' supply.
The facility will simulate changes in energy across the grid, both on a day to day basis as well as in extreme cases, to understand the demands on the system.
The technology will also be used to test how the anticipated electrification of the UK’s heat and transport networks will affect the grid and to evaluate the pros and cons of using DC, as well as AC supplies within homes.
Dr Pádraig Lyons, senior smart grids researcher at Newcastle University, said: “Computer models are good to a point, but they lack the realism to mimic constantly changing energy flows across the grid and state-of-the-art intelligent network control systems. With this new technology we are virtually linked up to the grid so the second by second fluctuations across the real network are also happening in real-time in our lab.
“We will be able to test a really tough day in a future scenario and then run it again and again under different conditions and with different energy demands to understand how the existing grid and a future intelligent grid would react and how we can overcome any problems before they happen in the real world.”
The laboratory is part of a larger Smart Grid project which includes a grid-scale energy storage test bed being developed on Science Central, a regeneration project being led by Newcastle University and Newcastle City Council.
Experts from the university, in collaboration with Siemens and Northern Powergrid, will be trialling new technologies for energy storage to efficiently and sustainably manage delivery of energy across the UK electricity grid.
Professor Phil Taylor, director of the Newcastle University Institute for Sustainability and academic lead for the UK’s largest £54 million Smart Grid project the CLNR (Customer-Led Network Revolution), said: “In the past, electrical networks were operated in a passive manner, electricity flowing from high voltage networks down towards the customer at low voltages. But as low carbon technologies have come along all that has changed. Distributed generation such as wind farms right down to heat pumps and solar panels in the home means power is now flowing in both directions and in a relatively unpredictable way.
“We need to find a way of managing that power in real time such that the low carbon transition can be achieved at reasonable cost and without degrading power system reliability. That’s why this new lab is so important. By understanding fully the demands on the system we can start to make the grid more intelligent - matching supply to demand in real time and within network constraints,” Taylor added.