Battery energy storage

Energy innovation

EDF Renewables has installed the UK’s first transmission-connected battery, sited at National Grid’s Cowley Substation.

The ‘hybrid’ Lithium-ion/vanadium flow battery will leverage the strengths of each technology to support more renewables, increase grid resiliency and create a smarter, more flexible system.

The Optimisation and Trading Engine will deliver specialist battery trading software, enabling the battery to trade on the Day Ahead and Intraday markets and the Balancing Mechanism.

Hybrid battery

The battery consists of a 50MW Wartsila lithium-ion battery and a 2MW Invinity Energy Systems vanadium flow battery. A combined energy management system controls and communicates with the Optimisation and Trading Engine (OTE) which will decide the optimum charge/discharge schedule for the battery.

This combination provides synergies for supporting National Grid’s frequency response tenders, allowing the vanadium flow (which doesn’t degrade) to do much of the heavy lifting in providing a frequency response service together with the lithium-ion, thus reducing degradation on the lithium-ion.

Vanadium flow technology

Invinity Energy System’s Vanadium flow battery provides flexibility and longevity for the ESO storage solution. Specific benefits include:

Long lifetime

Use for over 25 years without storage capacity degrading

Safe and non-flammable

Safe, non-toxic chemistry with no risk of thermal runaway

Innovative overdrive technology

ESO will showcase new overdrive technology to improve its flexibility in a range of different use cases.

Vanadium flow chemistry

 

Project plan

ESO is a four-year project, launched in April 2019. 2022 marks when the project will be fully operational across power, transport and heat.

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