City Battery

The city battery is a battery in an urban environment in which energy can be stored. The battery that will be installed at Rijnstraat 8 in The Hague has a capacity of 500 kWh. This will provide approximately 200 workplaces in the office at Rijnstraat 8 with electricity for a week. With this small battery we are gaining experience that can be used later when installing larger batteries in the urban environment.

The battery can be charged in several ways. This can be based on the solar energy of your own solar panels, but it can also be through energy from the network when there is overproduction (usually as a result of a large supply of solar and wind energy) on the national grid. 

The electricity grid is filling up. Due to the strong growth in the supply of locally produced, renewable electricity such as that from solar panels, the electricity network in the Netherlands cannot cope with the production, and so-called network congestion arises. This means that there is not enough space on the electricity network to realize new connections. By installing storage capacity, we relieve the energy grid and create space for new locally produced electricity.

With the installation of the City Battery, EnergieRijk Den Haag  wants to gain knowledge and experience in the field of energy storage in the urban environment. By realizing storage capacity, we relieve the energy grid and we expect to be able to provide space for locally produced energy in the future as well. In this way we contribute to a reduction of the CO2 footprint for the Netherlands.

The City Battery is an initiative of Energierijk The Hague and was realized with the cooperation of ATEPS, BAM, Invesis, Rijksvastgoedbedrijf and TROEF.

The battery will be extensively tested in the second half of 2013. In order to relieve the electricity grid on a large scale, more batteries will have to be installed. The aim of EnergieRijk Den Haag is to use the experiences with this battery to share knowledge, so that in the future several city batteries can further relieve the electricity network.

The tests focus on:

•     the degree of peak reduction that can be achieved with the City Battery
•     the City Battery's contribution to bringing more balance to the local electricity network
•     the possibilities to purchase electricity at favorable (cheap) times with the City Battery
•     the possibilities of using the City Battery for specific purposes, for example by using all stored electricity for the company restaurant or lifts, for example, as a contribution to the more conscious use of energy by employees.

In the coming year we will share the lessons learned through handouts. We publish the guidelines on the ERDH website and are accessible to everyone.

Environmental impact has been taken into account in the production of the City Battery. The battery consists of the next stage lithium batteries, so-called Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries. The advantage of these batteries is that they do not require raw materials such as Cobalt and/or Nickel and they also have the advantage that they have a longer lifespan than the Cobalt/Nickel rich batteries. However, the materials for the LFP batteries (lithium, graphite, phosphorus, etc.) are also scarce materials, especially in Europe. Methods to reuse batteries are therefore being looked for and methods have now been developed in which more than 90% of the scarce raw materials of the LFP battery can be reused.