Introduction: The scope of the project covers residential PV and distributed energy storage and is testing whether the existence of storage provides the opportunity to amend design policies to allow the connection of more PV than would otherwise be the case before there is a need to trigger reinforcement. It involves the installation of up to 40 energy storage devices and will also look at the extent to which these can be used to reduce winter peak loading.

Objectives:

The objective of this project is to develop sufficient data to determine whether it would be appropriate for design engineers to take into account the presence of distributed residential energy storage when considering an application to retrofit significant amounts of PV on social housing schemes. It will also explore the extent to which such battery systems can be used to reduce the winter evening peak load. 

Expected Benefits: The key success criteria is to obtain data streams that are sufficient to provide statistically robust conclusions on whether design engineers can, or cannot, take account of the existence of distributed energy storage units to increase the amount of PV that can be connected to an low voltage feeder / substation.

The project is knowledge development, likely to improve planning assumptions and network planning activities. It is therefore low TRL.