Battery energy storage
Energy innovation
The Energy Superhub Oxford will install the UK’s first transmission-connected battery, sited at National Grid’s Cowley Substation
The ‘hybrid’ Lithium-ion/vanadium flow battery will enable load shifting for overnight charging of fleet vehicles and the opportunity to provide services to National Grid and to trade on energy markets.
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. These will be controlled by a combined energy management system which will communicate 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 Fast Frequency Response (FFR) tenders, allowing the vanadium flow (which doesn’t degrade) to do much of the heavy lifting in providing an FFR 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 three-year project, launched in April 2019. 2020 is the key year for the project’s construction phase, and the system will go live at the end of the year.
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