Battery storage & solar

This is an excerpt from the minutes from our meeting in February 2018.

Battery storage and solar: Hounslow case study

Chris Little, London Borough of Hounslow

7 Boroughs came together to form the West London Alliance Energy Manager Group (WLA). The main intention of WLA was to share energy saving and carbon reduction ideas in order to identify collaborative projects achieving the same goals, taking advantage of the scales of economy.

The Western International Market is a night-operating wholesale market site with a combined roof area of about 11,000m².

It was the largest PV array in the capital at the time with simultaneous charge/discharge, and was therefore ground-breaking.

The site had a 3.6MWh/annum consumption, with a spike at 6am where everyone plugged in their forklift trucks after the night shift.  This was addressed with time-switches to shift the load into the PV curve.

1.73MW of PV was installed, accounting for 40% of the site’s consumption, alongside 240kW battery storage.  The payback is 7.2years.

Hounslow is also exploring DSR and high frequency response, to sell power back to Heathrow.  Other sites are also being explored for a 12MW scheme.