New type of energy storage battery to be trialled at Keele in UK first

Keele has partnered with a UK technology company to test a new type of energy storage battery which could be used for storing renewable electricity. 

Offgrid Energy Labs, a UK battery technology company that manufactures ZincGel® long-duration energy storage (LDES) batteries, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Keele to deploy the technology on the campus. It will be the UK’s first zinc-LDES project using a battery manufactured entirely in the UK.  

Under the agreement, the two parties intend to deploy a pilot ZincGel® battery system at Keele’s campus to assess how the technology could capture and store approximately 1 MWh of surplus renewable energy each month, while validating its safety, depth of discharge and round-trip performance under real operating conditions.  

The findings will provide the technical evidence needed to develop a proposal for a larger, multi-MWh ZincGel® deployment at Keele, designed to absorb excess and otherwise curtailed renewable energy generated on the campus. 

Professor Raphael Hirschi, Director of Keele’s Digital Society Institute, said: “It is exciting to start working with Offgrid Energy Labs to address the challenges of renewable energy intermittency and long-duration energy storage. In the short term, we will validate the technology that Zinc-Bromine batteries offer to provide an important alternative to lithium-based technology for energy storage on the timescale of one day. In the longer term, we will explore storage on the timescales of a day as well as a full year.”  

Tejas Kusurkar, Co-Founder of Offgrid Energy Labs, said: "We are pleased to announce our first pilot of ZincGel technology, in partnership with Keele University. The pilot is designed to show that the UK can manufacture long-duration batteries domestically, using a chemistry that needs no lithium, cobalt or nickel and no capex-heavy manufacturing infrastructure. It's an important step in bringing UK-manufactured long-duration storage to market, and we look forward to building on this partnership towards a larger deployment at Keele."  

Baroness Luciana Berger, Chair of the Energy Storage Association, said: "It's great to see Keele University and Offgrid Energy Labs join forces, brought together through shared membership of the Energy Storage Association UK and the LDES working group, to deploy ZincGel batteries on campus. Offgrid's technology will derisk the battery supply chain by reducing our dependence on imports, while helping to cut curtailment costs for Keele's Low Carbon Energy Generation Park. This is what great collaboration looks like."