Project Sensible is an EU funded project who’s aim is to understand the economic benefits that energy storage can bring to households, communities, and commercial buildings. They have three sites in the UK, Portugal, and Germany
Their site in the UK is in Nottingham and they are working with the University of Nottingham and Mozes (community energy project in the Meadows) to research how using electrical energy storage within a residential community could reduce the energy costs for consumers. They aim to do this using technology and equipment that is commercially available today. They also want to explore the concept of the “Energy Community” – where individual consumers work together to make best use of their own resources – solar generation, energy storage etc – and then use their stronger buying power to trade with the main energy suppliers. Their specific objective here is to show that by controlling the energy storage for the community rather than for the individual consumer, they can help to increase the benefit of these energy storage systems
They are doing outreach to engage the community in the project and they asked us to help design some sessions around the concept of energy storage to run at the Greenfields Community School with year 5 and 6 students.
We delivered this workshop on 27th February and the sessions we developed to highlight how energy storage can be useful were:
‘Intermittancy’ – Two bicycle generators powering lights and sound for a ‘disco’. The problem is that when people stop pedalling the disco stops. This problem can be solved by introducing a battery into the system to smooth the output and mean the disco can continue when people switch over on the bikes.
‘Big Load’ – A recumbent pedal generator connected to a large load (some powerful white lights). When directly connected it is difficult to pedal and the lights are very dim. But when a battery is introduced into the system it is easy to pedal, this charges the battery (as displayed on a light tower), then when ‘full’ the battery can run the lights at full brightness.
