Moixa chief executive Simon Daniel says the UK is ready for a large-scale roll out of domestic battery storage across the UK. He wants to deploy 1GW of aggregated capacity, via the company’s GridShare platform, by 2020. He says the UK is the perfect place: “Europe has a domestic-driven peak so capacity prices and margins are geared around the winter peak.”
The UK has a disproportionate amount of rooftop photovoltaics (PV) – 850,000 homes; even the USA only has a million – and lots of social housing (some of which already has PV). “That’s why the UK is a good market,” he says, plus “the UK has a mechanism for financing large-scale deployment… and we have a deregulated utility market and you can sell services to National Grid.”
He says the PV rollout showed how that financing mechanism could work for storage or a PV/storage combination. “The [PV boom] is partly the feed-in tariff but also it’s about how the financial community packaged and delivered funding for tens of thousands of private solar homes or for social housing.
“All that money in the finance community is looking for a new home. Billions of pounds has gone into solar and it is now looking at storage as the emerging asset class. Storage makes solar work, because from a network perspective solar is not a friend to the grid, it’s a liability.”
Moixa’s GridShare is a ‘middle layer’ that can be used by companies selling flexibility services (such as Flexitricity or Kiwi Power) or selling direct to National Grid. “We can provide services across the full stack of the energy system, from the domestic daily user to the arbitrage of balancing utility, or to the local community,” says Daniel. The domestic scale is key: “If you put a battery with an asset you are more constrained on the services you can tackle. What GridShare has done is integrate our fleet of Moixa batteries with third-party batteries into this aggregate cloud and then package it up to provide services to stakeholders.”
Subscribers login to read the full interview
Not a subscriber? Subscribers receive our weekly Update, monthly Report and have access to our online databases with extensive data on power plants and tendered network assets.
Contact [email protected] to see if you qualify for our next free trial