The Global Academy of Technology (GAT) College, an engineering education institution in Bangalore, India, has installed a 30 kilowatt (kW), 120 kilowatt hour (kWh) ESP30 vanadium flow battery at the school's SunEdison-GAT solar research and testing center.
The long-duration battery (four hours at nominal power) will reduce the need for GAT College to run diesel-fueled generators when there are power outages at night. In 2014, GAT College purchased 700 gallons (2,940 liters) of diesel fuel with its 180KVA backup diesel generator.
The ESP30, the first vanadium flow battery to be installed at an Indian academic institution as well as the first to be installed in the Indian state of Karnataka, was commissioned on May 30, 2015. The battery will store energy generated by a SunEdison 50 kW photovoltaic (PV) solar power system.
SunEdison, Inc., the world's largest renewable energy development company, collaborated with the college in Bangalore to create a research and development facility at the Bangalore campus. The facility is used to study solar water pumps, storage solutions, hybrid systems, solar power plant monitoring and mounting structures. This facility started operation in March 2014.
GAT College faculty and students will use the new batteries to study how vanadium flow batteries operate and work in conjunction with PV solar power systems. Faculty and students will study how rural microgrids can use energy storage to optimise PV solar power system production, and how a PV solar power system and vanadium flow battery perform under grid outage conditions.
In India, approximately 300 million people lack basic access to electricity, while electrified areas suffer from rolling electricity blackouts. Solar power combined with long duration energy storage offers a potential solution to both these challenges, allowing India to spread reliable clean energy to areas with no or unreliable access to the grid.
Unlike many other battery technologies, the Imergy ESP30 will be able to handle
Bangalore's extreme temperatures without any impact on its performance.
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