UK-based residential energy storage firm Moixa has begun installing on an archipelago off the Cornish coast in southwest England as part of a £10.8 million (US$14.1m) ‘smart energy’ project.
Hitachi Europe is leading the Isles of Scilly project, which Moixa said will be “a global test-bed”, supporting electric vehicles and heating systems on islands that have no gas supply and rely heavily on imported fossil fuels and electricity.
Moixa will install a total 43.8 kilowatt-hour of its compact, wall-mounted lithium-ion phosphate battery systems in homes and at non-domestic sites. Ten smart homes will pilot different mixes of low-carbon technologies that will also include air source heat pumps and smart water heaters.
Around 450kW of solar panels will be installed on the roofs of more than 70 council-owned homes, on the islands’ fire station, their recycling facility and desalination plant, and— subject to planning consent— in a ‘solar garden’ near the airport.
Moixa said it has developed smart control systems with home energy services company PassivSystems “to manage and optimise the batteries, heat pumps and water heaters for householders, using artificial intelligence to learn their patterns of consumption and maximise savings”.
The batteries, smart heating devices and electric vehicle will integrate with an Internet of Things-enabled energy resource management platform developed by Hitachi Europe.
Moixa chief technology officer Chris Wright said the initiative “will demonstrate the value of technologies that can benefit communities all over the world”.
The Smart Energy Islands project is part financed with £8.6m from the European Regional Development Fund.
Last November, Moixa was awarded £267,750 in UK government ‘entrepreneurial funding’ to expand its ‘GridShare’ cloud-based virtual power plant— which ‘aggregates batteries to reduce costs and enable more renewable generation”.
Moixa announced earlier this year it would be exporting its home storage battery tech to Japan under a partnership agreement with the country’s Itochu trading house.
