Steve Rogerson visits the University of Nottingham to hear about its new smart microgrid.

I wish I had been a fly on the wall when representatives from Western Power, now part of National Grid, called in on the scientists at the UK’s University of Nottingham’s new Power Electronics & Machine Centre (PEMC) to lecture them about what they could and could not connect to the utility’s grid.

The building, which opened in March 2021, carries out serious research and testing of high-voltage electrical systems and can sometimes be drawing up to 5MW of power. It decided to install its own microgrid that would use solar power and battery storage to handle some of the load. I will come back to that later but you can read more about it here.

When Western Power heard about the activities at PEMC, it realised this would be connected to part of its grid that was supplying power to a particularly posh bit of Nottingham; they decided to lecture the scientists on what they could and could not do.

The story was told to me by Pat Wheeler, head of the research group at PEMC, during an outreach event they held this week. I attended this as I originally covered the story and this was almost on my doorstep – I live in Nottingham. Pat told me during a coffee break that Western Power soon discovered the people at the facility knew more about how it all worked than they did.

Nevertheless, the utility told the facility they would not be allowed to send power back to the grid. They were worried that fault currents could disrupt the supply to those posh residents. Pat described the utility people as “grumpy” and hoped one day to change their mind.

“We agreed not to regenerate because it made them less grumpy,” said Pat. “We disagree with them technically and the decision does cause us some problems, but it is all about working with the utility and accepting their grumpiness. But as a university we are trying to educate them as well. In the long term, I would like to get into regeneration, but we are not going to push them on that yet.”

The smart DC microgrid when it is completed later this year will supply about 1MW to the PEMC and the neighbouring Research Acceleration & Demonstration (RAD) building on the Jubilee Campus.

This microgrid was not in the building’s original plan and came about when Research England contacted them and said it wanted the operation there to be closer to net zero, and offered the facility £2m. Pat took the money and the Feed-MT (future energy efficiency with DC microgrid technologies) project was born.

Leading the project is US power equipment giant Cummins and its project engineer AJ Ladenegan was at this week’s event to explain how it will all work.

“We want to help them reduce the amount of power they draw from the grid by about 1MW,” he said.

As I mentioned earlier, the facility will be drawing up to 5MW at peak times but mostly it will be drawing less than 1MW and so will be covered by the microgrid.

“The extra cost of going up to 5MW with the microgrid isn’t warranted for what we are using,” said Pat. “That may change over time. We have little idea of what research we will be doing in a few years, so it is a best guess based on what we know now.”

When it is drawing less than 1MW, the power can be stored in batteries or in an electrolyser as hydrogen. The renewable power for the microgrid will come from solar panels on the building’s roof. RenEnergy is supplying the solar power equipment. The battery system from UK firm Aceon will be able to feed the PEMC or convert hydrogen to electricity via a fuel cell from Cummins subsidiary Accelera that forms part of the microgrid. In addition, stored hydrogen will be fed directly for use by the RAD building. Other companies supplying equipment for the project include Alencon in Pennsylvania, EPC Power from California and Multi Source Power (MSP) in the UK.

“Aceon and MSP have been really good partners in designing this system,” said AJ.

All is going to plan for the microgrid to be up and running by the end of the year, and then maybe they will go back to grumpy people at the utility to show them what else they can do.