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Europe’s largest battery energy storage installation has gone live in the UK with the capacity to store up to 196MWh of electricity, pointing to greater use of the technology to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.
The Pilswood project near Hull on England’s North Sea coast has been developed by Harmony Energy Limited and aims to provide load balancing services to the electricity grid. It claims to store enough energy to power about 300,000 homes for two hours.
According to Harmony, the project is based on Tesla battery technology, which employs multiple units of the company’s Megapack system. Each unit is the size of a shipping container and is capable of storing over 3MWh of energy. Construction of the project has also been managed by Tesla.
The same technology is already in use at the Victoria Big Battery in Australia, one of the world’s largest renewable energy storage facilities.
The new facility is located close to National Grid’s Craik Bec substation, which is planned to be a connection point for the massive Dogger Bank offshore wind farm, Harmony said, the first phase of which is expected to go live next year.
The Pilswood project was originally due to come on stream in December in two phases, but Harmony claims activation has been brought forward to support the National Grid in its efforts to provide stable and secure power over the winter period.
The move follows reports of a potential blackout this winter, which prompted the UK government to hold discussions with datacenter operators about keeping infrastructure operating.
Such high-capacity energy storage systems can play a role in keeping datacenters online, potentially replacing diesel-powered generators that are widely used for backup power at datacenter sites.
Earlier this year, Google began testing a similar system at one of its datacenters in Belgium, with the stated goal of being powered entirely by carbon-free energy by 2030. At its St. Ghislaine datacenter, the search giant used its battery system to replace it. Diesel power backup. He said the battery system would also be used to balance the local electrical grid.
Such systems could see datacenter operators feed some of their excess energy storage capacity back into the grid during periods of high demand, according to a study by research firm Omdia earlier this year. Microsoft and UPS vendor Eaton are also considering enabling this in Azure datacenters.
Meanwhile, Harmony said it has five energy storage systems under construction with energization dates set for sometime between now and October 2023.
Director Peter Kavanagh said the completion and energy of the Pilswood project was an important milestone for the company as it was the first in the portfolio to come online.
“All stakeholders have recognized the importance of securing energy for this project before winter so that BESS services can be provided in the early winter months and we thank Tesla, G2 Energy and Northern Powergrid for their efforts to deliver this project. A very challenging geopolitical and global supply ahead of schedule despite the chain environment,” he said.
Andrew Buss, senior research director at IDC Europe, said battery power has its place, but that projects such as the Pilswood project may not be the best model for datacentres. “It’s true that battery-based energy storage systems have the ability to decouple power supply to infrastructure from the grid and take over when power fails. We see it both for more general purpose use as well as more applicable for datacenter use. Looking. Large-scale neighborhood, block or metro area power.”
He added: “One of the biggest issues is scale and cost, and although there are some good examples of grid-based systems like Hull, not all of these may be feasible for a datacenter campus.”
Buss said it would be more feasible to switch from lithium batteries to old-fashioned lead acid types or hydrogen-based fuel cells that some datacenter operators are experimenting with.
“At the end of the day, diesel generators are quite compact, very cheap, well understood, generally reliable, so the case for replacing them in an already built installation based on ROI or emission reduction is relatively small.” ®
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