RE: Scottish Power to install large lithium-ion battery - Tesla V3 Supercharging

three-phase — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 19:41:38 GMT

In the UK, EDF completed a 49MW Lithium battery storage at West Burton in June 2018.

and Centrica completed its 49MW Lithium battery storage station in Cumbria in December 2018.

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qol7NUlDV4I:740:466]

I think the UK Grid will still be around for a while to come. Protection systems in the UK rely on high fault currents to trip the breakers, micro-grids usually have current limiting, so the protection would not operate. There is also a lot of off-shore wind and potentially wave power that needs to be fed into the system somehow.

Generation is also not spread out across the country where it is required. The power hungry south east has very little generation, so power still has to get there somehow.

The battery systems are usually individually quite small and paralleled up to produce the 49MW. The batteries sit at around 1000V DC and are floated with earth fault monitoring that shuts down the inverters in the event of a fault. Overcurrent is via fast acting semiconductor fuses. Each battery cell has its own internal protection against over-current and over-temperature.

Each inverter has its own cooling plant and temperature monitoring and will shut-down to protect itself.

The inverters then feed into a standard electrical distribution system, through switchgear and step-up transformers out onto the network.

There is a built in water fire suppression system, that is contained within the building / drains. Generally the facilities are unmanned, so it would probably be a fairly stand-off approach from the fire and rescue service.

The station generally floats around 25MW capacity, so it can offer rapid response to over and under frequency excursions on the network.

Kind regards.

RE: Scottish Power to install large lithium-ion battery - Tesla V3 Supercharging

dubbie — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 08:44:17 GMT

This could well be a good step forward for improving the usefulness of wind and solar energy generation but it will still only manage smaller variations in power availability. I wonder if there is enough Lithium in the world to make enough batteries to make a truly effective system. Maybe the days of the National Grid are coming to an end and we will all end up with micro-grids for our locality.

Dubbie

RE: Scottish Power to install large lithium-ion battery - Tesla V3 Supercharging

ralphjy — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 21:19:10 GMT

A 50 Megawatt Lithium battery system sounds frightening. It would be interesting to see what their safety systems and failure mitigations are.