Scottish Power pilots smart batteries in customer homes

Scottish Power has teamed up with residential energy storage firm Moixa and Bill Save UK to pilot smart energy storage batteries in customers’ homes.

The 47 Maslow energy storage systems installed in homes will enable customers to save money through access to smart tariffs, store excess solar energy or share batteries with the grid. Households will also be able to view energy, battery and solar use in real time on their smartphone.

Scottish Power chief executive retail and generation Neil Clitheroe said: “Electricity is the only commodity that we can’t store at scale. We need to develop more large-scale storage projects, like pumped-storage hydro schemes, but also smaller in-home storage ideas, like Moixa’s smart battery concept.

“Our work with Moixa and Bill Save UK will allow us to understand how customers interact with electricity storage at home, and how systems like this can be tailored to offer real benefits for customers.”

Moixa has deployed 1MWh of storage systems installed across 500 sites including in social housing in Oxford for a study with British Gas and 250 as part of a demonstration for the Department for Energy and Climate Change on storage opportunities in the UK.

Moixa chief executive Simon Daniel said: “Whereas renewables such as solar and wind have often been seen as a liability to generation networks, the arrival of storage batteries provides an asset not only to householders but also to the grid which can use batteries for balancing and other services.”  

Daniel added that the firm would shortly be announcing the close of a round of finance including “several former chief executives of big six utilities”, to highlight the importance of energy storage “in the new utility landscape”.