Battery energy storage
Energy innovation
Energy Superhub Oxford 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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