Engineering news
One of the UK’s largest battery-based energy storage facilities has been connected to the grid as part of new research led by the University of Sheffield.
The £4 million facility based at Willenhall substation near Wolverhampton and is owned and operated by the energy storage research team at the University of Sheffield as part of the Energy2050 initiative, in conjunction with partners at Aston University and the University of Southampton. One of the first projects will be conducted by energy companies E.ON and Uniper. The firms will look at future possibilities for large-scale energy storage and how to overcome the challenges associated with connecting such technologies to the grid.
The facility is one of three of the largest batteries currently operational in the UK - and the first to use a lithium-titanate battery, supplied by Toshiba.
The Japanese company is supplying the project with a lithium-titanate battery SCiB system, which will provide 2MW of power to support grid management at the 11kV level. The battery has a long life and is capable of withstanding more than 10,000 charge-discharge cycles. It is also said to have a high level of reliability and operational safety, particularly in terms of low risk of fire, a danger associated with other lithium-ion batteries.
Lithium- titanate SCiB batteries are typified by fast charging and discharging in a wide range of temperature conditions. This means the Willenhall facility will be able to import and export electricity incredibly quickly in response to demands from the National Grid - at 4/10ths of a second, the University of Sheffield said it is the fastest battery energy storage system in the UK.
Professor David Stone, director of the Willenhall Facility and the Centre for Electrical Energy Storage at the University of Sheffield, said: “As the demand for energy increases in the UK, storage systems are needed to balance supply. The first commercial projects are coming on line, but there are still many technical issues to be explored in order to maximise the potential of these technologies and to reduce costs.
“This dedicated national research facility has been designed to offer enhanced frequency response to peaks in demand and is available to be used by other academic and industrial projects for their research and to test new technologies."
Arne Hauner, head of innovation economics from Uniper, said: “E.ON and Uniper will use the Willenhall battery system to provide ancillary services to the electricity network. The reason for doing this is to test the operation of a battery in a new market and to gain operational experience of a different battery storage technology compared to those which we currently operate.”
The University of Sheffield team, with their partners from Aston and Southampton, are already planning the next stage of research including looking at how used electric vehicle battery packs could test the viability for domestic or industrial electricity storage. This ‘second life’ system is due to go online later this year, aiming to combine the energy from the battery packs so that it functions together as a single larger battery unit.