Energy Storage

A new and exciting suite of technology solutions for the LV network to offer voltage regulation, phase balancing and energy storage to help deal with the constraints of a modern dynamic network.

Energy storage will play an increasingly important role in the energy transition by helping integrate increasing levels of intermittent renewable energy sources.

Residential areas have seen a huge uptake of rooftop solar PV over the last decade.  While this has been very positive in helping decarbonise the grid, it has also caused some voltage management challenges.

Feed-in tariffs have fallen drastically resulting in most consumers getting limited financial benefit for any excess solar energy fed into the grid.

Home energy storage is often proposed as a solution however potential customers are dissuaded from installing home battery storage due to the high upfront costs.

Community energy storage systems solve this by allowing multiple consumers to share a local battery energy storage system. The battery is installed within a community (typically on a pole in the street) and consumers pay a subscription fee to store their excess solar energy which they can retrieve when needed.

The community battery is much more cost effective than home batteries since it benefits from load diversity (not all consumers need to draw their saved energy at the same time) and scale.

Furthermore, retailers and network companies can use the community batteries to perform additional services such as grid support (voltage regulation, phase balancing, peak load reduction) and high-level virtual power plant functions like energy arbitrage/trading and ancillary services.

This ability to extract multiple values from the same resource maximises the benefit of community energy storage compared to energy storage at other network levels (home storage, large scale storage).

Contact us for more information relating to Energy Storage and to discuss our solutions.