Storage and Smart Grid
for the European EnergyKeeper project
To design, develop and test a storage system that would be competitive on the market and equipped with a monitoring system.
These are the premises of the European EnergyKeeper project which saw us working side by side with operators from different countries to complete this ambitious project.
The EnergyKeeper project (http://www.energykeeper.eu/), through funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 731239, involved a team of professionals consisting of technicians and specialist engineers belonging to various companies at European level, with the aim of building a flow battery based on organic redox 30kW materials with a capacity of 100kWh, equipped with a management system which allowed a plug & play integration at the Smart Grid of the ACRRES test site in Lelystad in the Netherlands.
The project also made it possible to determine the physical-chemical characteristics of different types of organic electrolytes (electrolyte density, diffusion coefficient, solution viscosity) and to define a number of useful quantities for the cells that compose the storage systems, such as voltage cell and stability after repeated charging and discharging cycles.
3D model of the 100 kWh/30 kW redox flow battery:
left – power supply unit containing batteries, battery management system, converter;
right – memory unit containing the electrolyte tanks.
The interoperability of the Smart Grid was ensured by a specially developed management system that was used to test certain business models proposed in the project.
On several occasions, Energy Team technicians went to ACRRES to install the tools and to make sure that the entire architecture worked as designed; this made it possible to remotely monitor the correct functioning of the system, guaranteeing its safety and reliability.
Furthermore, checks on the system carried out through the measuring devices implemented in the project (the NG-9 analyser and the NG-Gateway data logger) were used to successfully test the proposed business models.
The project was presented at a workshop held last October in the Netherlands and at which Energy Team, with the support of Falck Renewables, presented this and other cases of energy communities and sustainability.
