Cable Bridge to suspend cables over a walkway
• Cable Safety vs Cable Management • Confined Space Safety • Dropped Object Prevention
www.cablesafe.com
BATTERY STORAGE SHOWS SERIOUS POTENTIAL
ver the last five years, a vast number of home, business and building owners have become aware of the benefits of renewable energy technology and made significant investments in it, in an attempt to reduce their energy bills and emissions. The one drawback of this technology is that it is weather and climate dependent. Wind turbines do not function well in times of high pressure in winter, and solar panels are not particularly effective at night, which has meant that the excess energy generated by these technologies has simply been sold back to the National Grid. A solution to this process has now been developed commercially in the form of energy storage, which allows any excess energy generated by a renewable system to be stored and used at another time. Its emergence is likely to be the next big thing to hit the renewable energy market. The reason it is so effective is that it
O
enables the end user to make the most of productivity peaks. At present, we have above 8GW of wind power installed in this
country, but we produce anything from 500MW worth of energy to more than 7GW, depending on the weather. This wide variation in productivity is unhelpful as a means of power provision. However, we should now be able to take advantage of peak production, using excess energy at a time when the renewable systems that generate it are not so prolific. One instance where this has already occurred is the London Borough of Hounslow. The Borough’s senior staff made an investment of £2m in a 1.73MW capacity solar PV system, and four
60kWh lithium ion batteries. The system is now set to provide the site of the Western International Market (WIM) with nearly half its 3.5MWh yearly energy
requirements. It will also save the Borough an estimated £148,000
annually while providing an additional £107,000 from generation and export tariffs each year, meaning the investment should be recouped within eight years, instead of the standard ten plus. National Grid and the Network Operators are also experimenting with battery technology,
and a large storage system has recently been installed at Willenhall, West Midlands. The payback times for these systems
will be shorter still if incentives were offered to businesses to make the initial investment. The Energy and Climate Change parliamentary committee recently urged the government to incentivise the use of energy storage, arguing that it could bring about savings of £7 billion per year. Hopefully the newly created Department
for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) will explore options for this in the near future, especially giving consideration to their legally mandated emissions targets. Furthermore, if the Paris Climate Change Agreement is signed, and we commit to reducing our energy expenditure, we’ll then need to find new ways of reducing the emissions from the commercial buildings in our country. Energy storage will be vital if we want
to harness renewable energy sources to their full potential and cut energy bills and emissions.
Cresatech T: 08452 33 55 77
www.cresatech.com
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING | DECEMBER/JANUARY 2017 15
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