{"id":5259,"date":"2015-02-13T13:01:48","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T12:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=5259"},"modified":"2015-02-13T13:06:34","modified_gmt":"2015-02-13T12:06:34","slug":"one-thing-learnt-week-energy-storage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=5259","title":{"rendered":"One thing we have learnt this week – energy storage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cropped<\/a>This week I read an article claiming that a company involved in energy storage could put in as much as 30MWp of domestic capacity a week by working with a cable TV installer.\u00a0 This got me interested in their product and thinking about the idea of energy storage.\u00a0 How helpful would\u00a0energy storage be at the domestic level in grid management in managing renewables (especially solar) output?<\/p>\n

I’m not going to mention the companies name since its not generally this blog’s place except in exceptional circumstances to give commercial plugs (if I do its certainly not since I’m paid for it).\u00a0 The first thing to say I felt the price was OK.\u00a0 The second thing to consider was if I was going to buy one where would I put it?\u00a0 In the picture it looks a bit larger than a domestic boiler and like modern boilers mounts on the wall.\u00a0 Again I think I can solve this problem.\u00a0 It when I look at the technical details that my doubts started.\u00a0 Firstly at the moment the unit uses lead acid batteries.\u00a0 I would far prefer lithium ion and think that within a year or so that could be cheaper.\u00a0 The second problem is more puzzling.\u00a0 The energy storage unit seems to be designed to work in DC and thus seems to require the wiring of your house with additional DC circuits the idea being to run LED lights and devices that use transformers directly from DC.\u00a0 This is an idea I have heard before, that we should switch to DC since so many things we use run on DC (electronics)\u00a0 and we would cut out the inefficiencies of conversion from one to the other. Its not an idea I really hold with since not everything runs on DC, we would need to put additional wiring in our houses, its more dangerous and when you think about we would need to buy new power connectors to connect our phones etc. to the circuits.\u00a0 DC is also less efficient.<\/p>\n

The last thing all got me thinking about is would small scale energy storage make the grid easier to manage?\u00a0 The answer is no.\u00a0 Or at least not without smart metering.\u00a0 When you think about it without the utilities would have no idea how much we have generated or at what rate we were using it up.<\/p>\n

Energy storage is vital to iron out renewable variability and economically if the energy can be supplied cheaply enough at the domestic scale then it makes very good economic sense.\u00a0 I think energy storage at the\u00a0 domestic level is coming.\u00a0 At high penetration it will massively lower the need for central generation (at least at the brighter parts of the year) However, in the short to medium term this may not make the grid easier to manage.\u00a0 Some current articles on energy storage can be seen here<\/a> and here<\/a><\/p>\n

Neil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I read an article claiming that a company involved in energy storage could put in as much as 30MWp of domestic capacity a week by working with a cable TV installer.\u00a0 This got me interested in their product … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,17,4],"tags":[84,61,85],"class_list":["post-5259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-costs","category-one-thing-we-have-learnt-this-week","category-renewables","tag-energy-storage","tag-renewable-energy","tag-smart-meters"],"yoast_head":"\nOne thing we have learnt this week - A look at energy storage<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week I read an article claiming that a company involved in energy storage could put in as much as 30MWp of domestic capacity a week by working with a cable TV installer.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=5259\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=5259\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=5259\",\"name\":\"One thing we have learnt this week - 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