The Three Rs: Reliable, Resilient and Renewable

A new project on the Isle of Skye is investigating ways of protecting electricity supplies to remote or isolated communities, without just building more pylons and power lines. The Resilience as a Service technology is a smarter system that could also make greater use of renewable power sources.

When it comes to a reliable and resilient supply of energy, remote areas of the country can sometimes find themselves at the mercy of extreme weather events or mechanical and electrical failures.

We’ve all seen the news pictures of isolated villages cut off from power supplies in sudden storm or flash flooding. Preventing this involves building more energy infrastructure –pylons and cables, which can be visually damanging to parts of our countryside, or burying overhead cables underground which comes at significant cost. 

Smarter technology means we have other ways to improve the resilience of the energy network for customers in rural areas – it also means we can potentially make greater use of renewable energy generation.

We are working with SSEN and Costain on a trial project called Resilience as a Service (RaaS) which will use the latest battery technology to support the network and maintain power supplies to customers in an emergency. It’s called working in ‘islanded mode’ which means an area is disconnected from the main electricity grid but still operates independently.

Under this new project, customers in areas at risk of power outages, can rely on the battery technology, keeping people connected with power for an extra three or four hours while network engineers work to correct the fault. True, we were measuring this winter’s storm outages in days and even weeks in some cases, but had the network remained live, engineers could have been able to pinpoint faults quicker, meaning service would have been restored much sooner.

The clever part is rather than a fit-and-forget approach to this technology, we can make the best commercial use of the battery throughout the year, minimising the cost of delivering the RaaS service while making sure it’s available right when needed.

As one of Europe’s leading smart energy solutions providers, E.ON has extensive expertise in network engineering, batteries and demand side response. We are responsible for the technical solutions behind this project – not only the solution specification and the batteries themselves but also how all the different elements connect to energy market opportunities while at the same time remaining capable of delivering the support needed at a moment’s notice. We’re also making sure this project has a viable financial base, so this type of solution is effective and sustainable here and in other situations.

We have significant experience in exactly these kinds of projects. Our energy project in the village of Simris, Sweden (see below) was the first project of its type and makes best use of locally generated renewable power, allowing the villagers to generate and store their own green power, creating a community of self-sufficient and engaged energy users.

Projects like this can also help in future with making better use of local renewable energy generation. RaaS also allows local renewables to continue generating and exporting power when the grid is disrupted. That makes the most of the zero-carbon electricity which would otherwise be lost if they couldn't export the energy.