LONDON, UK: redT energy plc, the energy storage solutions company, announced that one of its 300kWh flow machines, situated at a customer site in Southern England, has successfully gained pre-qualification status to provide Dynamic Firm Frequency Response (FFR) services to the UK grid following testing conducted by leading UK aggregator, Open Energi.

Dynamic FFR is a balancing service procured by the UK’s National Grid, designed to keep grid frequency close to 50Hz. It is one of the most valuable balancing services available in the UK market today, requiring assets to respond within 2 seconds and sustain the response for up to 30 mins (although typically this requirement is much shorter).

The service plays a vital role in balancing out frequency volatility on the UK network caused by plant outages and other destabilising events. Until now, frequency services have been mainly supplied by conventional lithium-ion batteries, pumped hydro and demand-side response (DSR) mechanisms. This achievement by redT is the first time that heavy-cycling, redox flow machines have qualified for this market.

Situated at an industrial site in Dorset and coupled with 250kWp of solar panels, redT’s customer benefits from the heavy-cycling, non-degrading characteristics of flow machines by ‘stacking’ multiple activities together, maximising returns on the project.

For instance, the site stores large amounts of excess solar power generated during the day for use at other times when grid prices are more expensive. This allows the site to reduce its exposure to peak electricity prices and offset a proportion of its carbon footprint, by more fully utilising its own solar generation. The site can also buy energy directly from the wholesale market at low prices, which generates further savings.

In addition to this, the site can also now earn revenue by providing a full suite of ancillary services (including, but not limited to dynamic FFR) via Open Energi’s Dynamic Demand 2.0 aggregation platform.

Neil O’Brien, Executive Chairman at redT said: “This is a key achievement which highlights the suitability of flow machines to provide a full range of services for the UK market. The flexibility and heavy-cycling nature of our technology will play an important role in the low carbon energy network of the future, reducing system balancing costs whilst providing real benefit to our customers at a distributed level.”