A first-of-its-kind microgrid project, led by the Sunderland City Council in the UK, aims to deliver 100% renewable electricity for car manufacturer Nissan and its suppliers in the UK, as part of a larger electric vehicle manufacturing plan. Contact online >>
A first-of-its-kind microgrid project, led by the Sunderland City Council in the UK, aims to deliver 100% renewable electricity for car manufacturer Nissan and its suppliers in the UK, as part of a larger electric vehicle manufacturing plan.
"We''re proud to be acting as a key enabler, working to secure an £80 [$110] million infrastructure project bringing together energy generation, consumption and storage through a dedicated microgrid," said Councilor Graeme Miller, Sunderland City Council''s leader.
The project is part of the wider announcement of Nissan EV36Zero, a $1.4 billion electric vehicle hub, creating an electric vehicle manufacturing ecosystem centered around Nissan''s manufacturing plant in Sunderland.
Nissan and its partners, Envision AESC, a global player in battery technology, and Sunderland City Council, will make the initial investment. This will fund three interconnected initiatives: electric vehicles, battery production and the renewable energy microgrid.
According to Nissan, the project is a globally unique combination of 600,000 vehicles per year production capacity at a 35-year old plant, with on-site battery production, renewable energy and second life batteries as storage.
The clean energy supplied by the microgrid will benefit the other announced initiatives; $585 million will be invested in the production of a new-generation all electric vehicle, and $622 million for Envision AESC to build the UK''s first gigafactory. The factory will produce batteries for up to 100,000 Nissan electric vehicles per year.
The Grove Park housing and business development at Sellindge, near Ashford in Kent, will be powered exclusively via a renewable energy plus storage microgrid coupled with a smart grid management controller.
Housing developer Quinn Estates is working with SNRG SmartGrids, a microgrid-as-a-service company that is backed by Centrica, one of the UK''s largest energy companies. SNRG will design, finance, build and operate the privately owned microgrid, providing energy-as-a-service for the 162 houses being built at the project.
Grove Park has outline planning consent and although firm details for the microgrid are still being finalized, construction development is expected to commence by the middle of 2022. It will form part of a pipeline of some 24,000 homes that Quinn Estates has in planning across southeast England.
"This project is reflective of the fact that we really have to decarbonize if we are going to meet our climate change goals. The Future Homes Standard will require new homes to be zero carbon-ready and all electric with no gas network connection. The government has set a target of implementing that by 2025," Dan Nicholls, managing director of SNRG SmartGrids, told Microgrid Knowledge.
The SNRG business model is designed to reduce risk, cost and complexity for the construction industry as it moves to develop all electric housing. Part of the smart management system includes an EV charge management system to limit peak loads as part of a demand-side response capability.
Nicholls noted, "There is a knock-on benefit for the developer in terms of the amount of capacity that needs to be secured and the noncontestable costs associated with reinforcing the distribution network." Consumers also have to shoulder some of this cost.
"There''s a wider benefit, too. If we are to meet the target of building 300,000 new electric-only homes a year in the UK, the costs of upgrading the grid to meet that need could be quite substantial. We can mitigate that with local energy systems," Nicholls added.
SNRG aims to create an energy positive neighborhood, which will generate more power than it consumes and will save residents up to 30% on their energy bills. "Our vertically integrated local energy solution also ensures that consumers don''t pay more to live in an all-electric home," he said.
The Grove Park project will include a total renewable energy generation portfolio of around 500 kW and thus at the small utility scale. But with a significant pipeline of potentially suitable projects under development, the microgrid-as-a-service model could see a substantial advantage emerge in terms of ancillary services and overall grid management.
"Building out these modules to serve the community does present an interesting opportunity in terms of new business models. You end up building a fairly significant generation portfolio that could potentially be aggregated and leveraged," Nicholls said.
Microgrid is the key technology to allow the power grid to accept more clean distributed renewable energy generations. Compared to alternating current (AC) power systems, direct current (DC) power systems has the advantages of simpler control, higher reliability and efficiency. However, challenges to employ LVDC microgrid technologies in our current power networks remains largely open.
This project will build on the strengths of the Power Electronics group and the Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST), including power converters, energy storage, smart grid, energy network, and renewable energy generations.
Our research has received funding support from UKRI EPSRC and EU Horizon 2020 programme, and has established strong international and industrial links. Research facilities include a hardware-in-loop simulation platform for computational studies, a reconfigurable DC microgrid research and demonstration platform for experimental evaluation, and a LabVIEW-based control and monitoring system for DC microgrid control, data analysis and system optimization.
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