Centrica and NREL Pursue a Cost-Effective Hybrid Battery Storage System (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video Centrica and NREL Pursue a Cost-Effective Hybrid Battery Storage System.

Xiang Wang, Chief Technology Officer, Centrica: Energy storage is the key to decarbonizing our grid.

Martha Symko-Davies, Lab Program Manager–Energy Systems Integration Facility, NREL: As a user facility, the Energy Systems Integration Facility brings in folks like Centrica, who are asking what-if questions and how to make the greatest impact they can as we think about addressing the energy system.

So, they came to us to partner with us, to work on how to integrate their controller with a novel, new hybrid battery system.

Adarsh Nagarajan, Group Research Manager–Systems Engineering, NREL: HYBRED is an advanced, multi-objective, optimal design and planning tool that's integrated with Centrica's advanced controllers.

This tool provides end-to-end customized, hybrid energy solutions to meet customer needs.

Kelly Jiang, Technology Strategy and Innovation Analyst, Centrica: There are the two components, there's the sizing tool, which aims to figure out the optimal size for the customer, and then there's also the control algorithms, which try to dispatch the batteries for the maximum benefit for the customer.

Xiang Wang, Chief Technology Officer, Centrica: We see more and more that commercial and industrial customers are looking for energy storage solutions.

It helps the customer to plan for this type of energy storage projects; it's really a much-needed tool.

Ying Shi, Senior Energy Storage System Engineer, NREL: It's cheaper if you look at the cost over the lifetime of the battery system.

It also gives us the opportunity to look into the sustainability of energy storage systems both from the vehicle space and the grid space.

Kelly Jiang, Technology Strategy and Innovation Analyst, Centrica: Right now, when batteries come out of EVs, they're currently just being stored in warehouses, there's a lot of issues with recycling efficiency.

And so, being able to re-purpose them into stationery storage, can have a big environmental benefit from an e-waste perspective as well.

Martha Symko-Davies, Lab Program Manager–Energy Systems Integration Facility, NREL: If we can get it right at a small scale, then we'll start to really be able to address security and resilience, which matters to every single customer out there today.

Xiang Wang, Chief Technology Officer, Centrica: I'm very excited about this tool. We are currently working with the NREL team to develop a proposal on how do we bring it to our customers to really help our customers and really be able to do that with reasonable costs, with very good return on investment, and I think this is the future role of this hybrid tool.

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