POWER, ENERGY & RENEWABLES


means significant increases to overheads. With legally binding targets for achieving net zero, legislative pressure is often compounded by sustainability demands from supply chain partners and customers. All this at a time when our energy supply is looking less secure, with the associated risk of disrupted productivity from blackouts, brownouts or power cuts. In this context, the three arms of the Energy Trilemma represent competing agendas: reliable energy is impractical if unaffordable, low-cost energy is irrelevant if it cannot be counted on, while continual reliance on fossil fuels is untenable given the climate crisis. While the UK ranks highly in the World Energy


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Council’s latest Index for its commitment towards resolving the issues of energy security and sustainability, the problem of affordability is where the UK falls short and this is echoed by what the British Chambers of Commerce describe as a real cost of doing business crisis. At the time of writing, increases in the domestic price cap, while painful for everyone, serve to highlight a distinct lack of support for businesses - contributing to the energy crisis and the UK’s exposure to geopolitical circumstances. Nearly 80 per cent of businesses consider rising energy prices to be their biggest


he issues of energy reliability, affordability, and sustainability impact on all our lives and on businesses, globally. For manufacturers the continual rise in energy prices


concern, with a lack of clarity regarding the level of increased overheads faced. It is unsurprising, then, that companies are taking matters into their own hands and looking to the innovative technologies that can help resolve the issues of the Trilemma, to access more affordable, sustainable and resilient power. Here, we consider three key power resilience technologies and their respective benefits for manufacturing.


BATTERY ENERGY STORAGE Power disruption is already a significant problem for UK manufacturing, costing three per cent of working days, meaning an average cost of £2.8 million for a typical medium sized business. To address this, many manufacturers already rely upon Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) backup to protect individual critical pieces of equipment against downtime. However, the agendas of reliability, affordability, and sustainability render traditional UPS inadequate. Switching constantly between AC and DC, despite being idle most of the time a traditional UPS will lose capacity at around 10 to 15 per cent. For a 1MW system, this represents a direct, unnecessary expense of about £200,000 per year, with the associated carbon emissions. A modern Battery Energy Storage (BESS) system, by contrast, will protect an entire site - something increasingly important as factories and processes become more interconnected - with a capacity loss of approximately one per cent.


Voltage optimisation installation


Inside a BESS unit Although blackouts are still quite rare in the


UK, the more common brownout - where voltage sags below the usual mains supply level - represents a major threat to continued power supply. As manufacturing processes become increasingly digitised, even a momentary power disruption can mean that sensitive equipment must be reset and, for high volume/value operations, the effects can be costly. For one aerospace client, for example, power disruptions had been resulting in scrappages equating to £150,000 costs per incident. The installation of a 1MW BESS with fast switching and control software has protected the client from an average of four power disruptions a year, making the project payback period less than two years. This technology offers additional benefits which help to meet the challenges of the Energy Trilemma. Where renewable energy is generated on-site, a BESS will store this energy to be used when needed, making for more reliable and flexible options when shifting to sustainable power sources. In the same vein, as manufacturers switch to electric vehicle (EV) fleets, a BESS offers a solution to the problems associated with the demand for the increased energy supply required for EV charging. One of the greatest assets of a BESS,


particularly in the current economic climate, is the potential it brings for new revenue streams, through balancing services. These opportunities benefit both the company’s bottom line - providing additional income - as


20 Autumn 2022 UKManufacturing


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