Research and Development

Our research and development skills are being used in a variety of projects, working with industrial and academic partners to design and deliver breakthrough concepts in renewables and networks.

Amongst those projects completed or currently under development are Demand for Wind, Redox Flow Cell Storage and DISPower.

Demand for Wind

(Project ongoing)

Wind is already the leading form of green energy production in the UK, but generation and demand do not always balance - particularly at night and during peak loads.

Demand for Wind seeks to redress this balance, by dynamically controlling household and commercial loads, in response to the amount of wind generation available locally, regionally or nationally.

The system will include a number of software elements, utilising standard communication technology over the internet. It will also result in a publicly available website, supported by a database of wind and load data.

Prototype systems will be trialed and tested with volunteer electricity customers from Good Energy, an electricity supply company with a pedigree in renewable electricity supply. The aim is for customers with wind turbines to use more of their own micro-generation power, thereby increasing its value.

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Redox Flow Cell for Grid Scale Electricity Storage

(Project ongoing)

Econnect is working on behalf of Energy for Sustainable Development Ltd (ESD) on this DTI part-funded development project, seeking to develop, build, test, grid-connect, commission and subsequently operate a 100kW redox flow battery for utility electricity storage.

The objective of the project is to produce a design that has a production target cost of £700/kW for 2 hours storage with 80% efficiency.

Econnect is utilising its extensive experience in grid connection and control of renewable energy systems to supervise the grid connection part of the project.

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DISPower: Distributed Generation with High Penetration of Renewable Energy Sources

(Project complete)

Under European Commission Framework V funding, Econnect investigated possible applications of load controller technology.  This work was part of a European-wide large consortium project entitled DISPower, which carried out research and technical development covering all key issues for distributed generation with a particular focus on achieving increased penetration of renewable energy resources to contribute to the targets set by the Kyoto Protocol.

Econnect found that load control was able to maintain the voltage below 6% of the nominal value during maximum generation and minimum load demand. 

The potential financial benefit of using load control in mitigating voltage rise problems caused by distributed generation was assessed using a 2.6MW wind turbine connected to a weak network as an example.

The financial loss, in the absence of a load control system, was estimated to be €3.5 million.  The cost of the load control system, used to avoid this constraining of generation, was estimated to be €87,000. Therefore, distributed load control appears an attractive option for alleviating voltage rise problems on distribution networks. 

This was just one small aspect of the research work undertaken by Econnect for the DISPower project.

Further details about DISPOWER can be found at www.dispower.org.

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