Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) and Eon have announced a pilot battery scheme designed to improve electricity resilience in remote and rural areas.
The Resilience as a Service (RaaS) project is a partnership between SSEN, Eon and engineering firm Costain. It is funded through Ofgem’s Network Innovation Competition.
It involves using a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) to restore and maintain power swiftly and automatically in the event of a fault in locations that experience a higher number of power outages.
During this time the network will be temporarily operated in ‘islanded’ mode, where part of it is disconnected from the main electricity grid and operated independently, while engineers resolve the fault.
RaaS would also allow local renewables to continue generating and exporting energy at times when the grid is disrupted.
The battery will be installed at SSEN’s Drynoch primary substation on the Isle of Skye. According to the network operator the scheme would be capable of providing discharge power of 6MVA for up to 3 seconds and 3MW during continuous operation.
Depending on the cell technology, it is expected that the battery would have a capacity of at least 3MWh.
SSEN said that initially sufficient energy will be reserved in the battery to supply the Drynoch site for 3 hours, across 90% of the year which, based on historic data, would cover a high proportion of power outages.
The remaining headroom capacity will be used for revenue optimisation from other markets and services, such as wholesale trading, the Balancing Mechanism and frequency response.
Eon will be responsible for the physical batteries and how the technology marries up to the Demand Side Response markets while remaining capable of delivering RaaS.
Simon Duncan, Eon’s director of B2B solutions, said: “At Eon we are leveraging our extensive expertise in network engineering, batteries and demand side response to bring energy resilience to remote areas like the Isle of Skye.
“This project is the first of its kind, so it’s exciting to be leading the energy transition with such a revolutionary idea.”
Sarah Rigby, SSEN innovation project manager, said: “The opportunity to now put this idea into practice is very welcome, as RaaS offers significant potential to improve security of supply for our customers.
“The approach is in line with everything that SSEN wants to do in delivering a low carbon, cost effective energy system and using flexible solutions and services to operate our network dynamically.”
David Jukes, Costain project director, said: “Wider stakeholder support shows that implementation of the project has the potential to play a key role in the resilience of the electricity network.
“Costain’s experience with complex stakeholder projects will be used to further develop commercial arrangements that will deliver the best outcomes from the concept and realise the full potential of RaaS.”