McPhy Energy has announced that Nottingham University has chosen the company’s solution for mid-term storage of renewable energy in a residential micro-grid under its “Creative Energy Homes” (CEH) project.  The ongoing CEH project aims to stimulate sustainable design ideas and promote new ways of providing affordable, environmentally sustainable housing that are innovative in their design.  The energy will be stored as solid hydrogen and will be used for storage of surplus solar and wind energy under a new phase of the CEH project, which targets greater energy-autonomy for the homes via a dedicated micro-grid.

Nottingham University’s Creative Energy Homes represent a unique research facility. The homes built under the program incorporate a range of low carbon technologies including renewable micro generation from solar, wind and ground source heat pumps. The houses have operated individually using only the renewable energy generated at that property. However, a practical, multi-home storage solution for surplus energy is needed to cover peak periods, especially after sundown and during periods of little or no wind.

To respond to this challenge, this new phase of the CEH project is building a microgrid that will provide an energy management system across several houses. The project will investigate the optimum performance for storing surplus energy as solid hydrogen in McPhy Energy’s MCP-N-4, a magnesium hydride (MgH2)-based storage tank, within the microgrid.  The hydrogen will then be used to feed the fuel cells on an as-needed basis.

Source: FuelCell Today