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Funder: InvestNI CASE
Duration: 1st March 2020 – 30th September 2021
Staff Involved: Dr P Keatley

The project will quantify the potential for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) owned and operated by NI Water to create customer and system value. To achieve this, three discrete levels of resource assessment will be modelled.

  • A digital twin of a number of exemplar test sites will be created in Scheider’s Ecostruxure platform. The twin will incorporate resources and loads within the site to optimise their interaction with variables such as electricity price, system charges and local generation. The creation of the digital twin will also allow a range of scales of BESS to be modelled.
  • The digital twin will interact with Grid Beyond’s Smart Grid Phasor Measurement and Control platform to create a link between the NI Water site and the DNO/TSO control room. The platform has a 20msec sampling and control clock and can capture voltage and frequency traces to this resolution while carrying out frequency and voltage control to 100msecs. It has communications interfaces which will allow it to communicate local voltage and capacity availability in real time to the DNO/TSO. Grid Beyond already carries out short term, day-ahead, intra-day and imbalance trading in partnership with Haven and EDF in the GB market using this system and are also working on this with ESB in RoI. The implementation of this project at NI Water sites will demonstrate how BESS could contribute to DS3 services for the NI TSO; and voltage, network congestion and peak management for NIE Networks.
  • In parallel with the Ecostruxure platform model, and using data from Grid Beyond’s control platform, the project will develop a number of network models with NIE Networks to assess the local impact of operating the BESS in the Neplan modelling package.

The combination of the three levels of modelling (BTM/customer-owned resource; network/grid interface and communications; local network/substation impacts) will define the full ‘value stack’ for each site/BESS resource assessed.

The project will also develop the concept for a mobile containerised storage system to be used as a ‘floating’ resource able to provide interim resilience to NI Water sites while shutdowns/refits are carried out, and as an R&D resource to evaluate the locational value of BESS at a range of NI Water sites.