LONDON (Alliance News) - RedT Energy PLC Wednesday said European energy supplier E.ON has opted to install one of the company's vanadium redox flow batteries at the headquarters of a warehousing and logistics company in order to assess the potential benefits of the system.
RedT is one of the companies pursuing the growing market for energy storage. Its batteries allow energy to be stored and used later in order to reduce waste and lower energy costs for its customers.
E.ON has decided to install one of RedT's batteries at the Somerset headquarters of JB Wheaton, a logistics and warehousing company, through an agreement which is part of a research project looking at how energy storage can meet the challenges being faced by commercial and industrial-scale operations.
Notably, E.ON was the unnamed European utility company that placed an order with RedT on December 14.
Eliano Russo, the head of energy storage solutions at E.ON, said: "We have recently launched a residential PV and battery storage product to our customers in Germany and as we develop our experience from this project with JB Wheaton we are interested in speaking with commercial and industrial customers in the UK who would be interested in investing in a battery storage solution."
A 5.0 kilowatt, or 40.0 kilowatt hour demonstration system will work alongside JB Wheaton's 3.5 megawatt solar panel installation, allowing JB Wheaton to store any excess energy being generated by the solar panels and to also store energy that is purchased from the national grid when demand, and therefore prices, are lower.
That would allow JB Wheaton to improve the efficiency of its energy usage but also providing options for the company to charge its electric fleet of vehicles overnight using energy generated during the day and provide the opportunity to minimise the amount of power being purchased from the grid.
"E.ON is trialling the system to understand the potential for improved payback on solar PV installations in commercial customers," said RedT. "The system will allow E.ON to examine the potential of such systems in providing ancillary services to help support the national grid."
The Chief Executive of RedT, Scott McGregor, said: "Distributed energy delivers valuable local economic benefits to the customer as well as providing essential reliability grid services to the energy company. This agreement is a prime example of how E.ON and J.B. Wheaton can work together to achieve a mutually beneficial, shared goal using redT technology."
RedT shares were up 4.0% to 7.67 pence per share on Wednesday morning.
By Joshua Warner; joshuawarner@alliancenews.com; @JoshAlliance
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