By Paul Homewood
From PEI:
UK energy storage developer KiWi Power has launched a multi-million-pound smart battery system in Wales.
The size of three shipping containers, the 4 MW system took three months to build and will provide balancing services to National Grid to regulate the frequency of Britain’s electricity network.
KiWi Power said it “marks a significant milestone in the application of ‘behind-the-meter’ smart battery technology in the UK, with capacity to store enough energy to power thousands of Welsh homes when needed, helping to build a low carbon economy in Wales”.
The system is located at Cenin Renewables at Parc Stormy near Bridgend, a 20-acre cluster of integrated clean energy technologies that includes a solar farm, an anaerobic digestion plant and a wind turbine.
“This is all about having green energy in reserve and we are delighted to play our part delivering a reliable, sustainable power source whilst providing local economic development and helping Wales reach its low emissions targets,” said Martyn Popham, Cenin managing director.
He added: “Smart batteries are both green and cost-effective, reducing the need for inefficient backup power stations by allowing excess energy to be stored and used when the sun isn’t shining and the wind has stopped blowing”.
Enough energy to power thousands of Welsh homes when needed? Impressed?
Well, perhaps not!
According to Kiwi Power themselves:
https://www.kiwipowered.com/kiwi-power-completes-largest-behind-the-meter-battery-to-date/
In other words, it can only supply its 4MW for 72 minutes, hardly long enough to be of any use to those “thousands of Welsh homes” when the sun isn’t shining and the wind has stopped blowing.
In reality it has nothing at all to do with “supplying homes”. It is simply just a money making scheme.
The FFR contract it has is worth £666k a year, all of course to be paid for by bill payers.
The National Grid has a licence obligation to control system frequency at 50Hz plus or minus 1%, and has always had a range of tolls to enable it to do so.
However, as energy consultants Origami Energy explain:
Firm Frequency Response is a service provided by energy users to National Grid, which uses approved assets to quickly reduce demand or increase generation to help balance the grid and avoid power outages.
The current UK power network is becoming increasingly challenging to balance. At times of high volatility, National Grid needs additional flexible generation and demand to balance the system and avoid power outages. Firm frequency response (FFR) uses approved assets to quickly reduce demand or increase generation when there is a large deviation in system frequency. Energy asset owners are rewarded for providing this service all year round, even if it is never deployed.
https://origamienergy.com/firm-frequency-response/
In other words, storage systems like Kiwi’s are only needed because of the increasing capacity of unreliable wind and solar power.
Kiwi themselves make no bones about their objective:
And as Clean Energy News reports, most of the profits will go to an “unnamed investor”:
The project has used third party finance from an unnamed investor which will take the lion’s share of the FFR revenue, while Kiwi takes a fee for managing the battery and Cenin also gets a share of the project’s revenue.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
February 22, 2018 at 08:45AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 