Energy storage company ESS has begun commercial shipments of a higher energy flow battery system called Energy Center. Building on its earlier Energy Warehouse product, this system has been sent to “a major Florida utility” and to its partner Portland General Electric for a demonstration project.
In an interview with BEST, Mark Moreton, ESS’s European sales director, said the company has increased the electrolyte energy density in the Energy Center by 20% to enhance energy storage capacity. He said this reduces costs by allowing a smaller footprint.
The system has energy capacities starting at 145kW DC for eight hours. It consists of 40-foot containers which can be stacked two high. He declined to give much technical data, as performance can vary depending on circumstance and usage.
He notes how the new Labour government under Keir Starmer is maintaining the drive towards long-duration energy storage started by the previous Tory administration. The government has a Great British Energy Bill going through the UK parliament. It has just passed its second reading and is at committee stage in the upper chamber, the House of Lords.
LDES is a prominent part of the bill and Moreton believes the Lords, who include energy experts, will “keep the government’s feet to the fire” on this and exert significant influence.
The government announced a cap and floor scheme last October for long-duration electricity. ESS is gearing up to be part of that, said Moreton. He notes that pumped hydro schemes – included in the government’s planning – can take a decade to realise.
“We’re not going to hit this (governmental) 2030 action plan if, if we’re putting all our eggs into the pumped hydro basket,” he said. “So the good thing is that technologies like ESS provide can be deployed relatively quickly.
“If a developer or an operator has a land and a grid connection, we could get a multi-hundred megawatt project implemented and operational within a year.”
This could be useful if international trade restrictions and tariffs mean locally assembled or manufactured flow battery plants became more favourable, he said. Main lead times would be the robotic production line for the energy stacks.
The UK’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero has done a study calling for 20GW of long-duration electricity storage in Britain. Energy minister Michael Shanks MP told parliament last October it would save £24 billion ($31 billion) by 2050.
Moreton said ESS is also moving towards offering very large grid-scale technology, hundreds of megawatts, and this will be available in the future.