Nottingham and Connected Energy have launched a large-scale vehicle-to-grid (V2G) demonstrator project. Installation of solar panels, battery storage and 40 bi-directional EV chargers complete the CleanMobilEnergy pilot at Nottingham City Council’s Eastcroft Depot.
Just outside the city centre, the depot is home to a fleet of 250 electric vehicles, including six zero-emission bin lorries. Already over half of the council’s vehicles are powered by electricity (51%), and Nottingham has set sight on ways to reduce carbon and energy costs with new technologies.
The CleanMobilEnergy pilot, funded by the European Union and Innovate UK, is complete and boasts 40 vehicle-to-grid chargers, making it one of the largest installations to date in the country. These are flanked by three solar arrays with a combined generation of 138kWp and batteries for energy storage.
These batteries come from Connected Energy, a company specialising in energy storage units made from second-life batteries. In Nottingham, Connected installed two 300kW systems, each made from 24 used EV batteries. The combined storage of 600kWh is enough to power the average UK household for two months.
At the Nottingham depot, however, they directly support the site in two main ways. They act as a store for the energy as both the PV panels and, at times, EVs will charge the batteries, which will then be used directly to power the site.
In turn, however, the system will also prop up the grid and provide power to the charge points to support load balancing. The battery energy storage working with solar PV also allows the site to maximise the use of renewable energy to decarbonise the charging of the fleet of EVs.
Nottingham City Council wanted to be able to respond to the ongoing evolution in the Grid Services market with a system that had the flexibility to be controlled and used for the best service at any given time, concludes Connected Energy when describing the brief.
Steve Cornes, Principal Energy Projects Officer, Nottingham City Council, added, “By using intelligently managed BESS and V2G, the use of on-site solar energy can be maximised, and the depot will effectively be able to isolate itself from the grid during peak periods and avoid peak tariffs.”
Wayne Bexton, Director of Environment and Sustainability, also stressed that the energy storage enables the council to store solar energy and sell it back into the grid “at the most lucrative times” of day. “As a demonstrator microgrid, it means we are less reliant on energy from the national grid to power our electric vehicles, helping us save money, save carbon and work towards carbon neutrality. I am extremely proud of the team working on this and thankful to our funders, Interreg NW Europe and Innovate UK.”
Nottingham City Council has built a reputation for innovative low-carbon projects, having recently completed a trial for wireless electric taxi charging and being the first city in the UK to use the Energiesprong whole-house retrofit approach.
Cllr Sally Longford, Portfolio Holder for Energy, Environment and Waste Services, said they were “racing towards becoming the first carbon neutral city in the UK by 2028”. The vehicle-to-grid pilot allows the council to “test solutions which could be rolled out in other areas of the country,” said Longford.
The next step for the CleanMobilEnergy project is the development of an open-source software system to monitor, control and predict weather forecasting to revolutionise the depot’s future energy use.
connected-energy.co.uk, mynottinghamnews.co.uk
Keyword: Nottingham now home to one of UK’s largest V2G installation