Tesla will provide a 2 megawatt-hour grid storage facility for a new housing development scheduled to take place in Nottingham, England — the legendary home of Robin Hood and his band of merry pranksters. The leaders of the Trent Basin project plan to redevelop an area of the city and build up to 500 homes in five phases over the next decade. Solar power figures prominently in their plans.
The Tesla Powerpack grid storage installation will be completed by September and will be fed by ground mount and rooftop solar panels generating a total of 375 kilowatts of electricity. As new homes are completed, some of the ground mount panels will be removed and relocated on the roof.
Blueprint, a public/private partnership that will manage the program, says it intends to incorporate solar energy, battery storage, and ground source heat pumps to lower the cost of utilities in the development by approximately 30%. The Tesla Powerpack grid storage installation will not only allow the Trent Basin project to operate as its own microgrid, it will also help balance the larger local utility grid. It will be the largest community storage facility in Europe, if indeed the UK can actually be classified as being part of Europe, a designation its inhabitants seem anxious to avoid.
“The way we generate and distribute energy in the UK is inefficient and carbon intensive. It doesn’t have to be like this. With new technologies, especially in renewable energy and storage it is possible to do better,” says Blueprint’s chief executive, Nick Ebbs. Purchasers of the new homes who elect to opt in to the microgrid will have smart meters installed in their homes and will be able to access real time data on their electricity usage via an app and voice controlled speakers that will deliver the information audibly if desired.
Trent Basin has qualified for £6 million of grant funding from two energy programs run by Innovate UK. A consortium composed of businesses, government, and academia has been formed to implement the redevelopment project and is led by the Blueprint partnership. It is intended to point the way to a future where lower utility costs and lower carbon emissions are possible. The Tesla grid storage installation will be a big part of making that promise a reality.
Source: Solar Power Portal
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