Keele University is partnering with UK battery technology company Offgrid Energy Labs to trial a new long-duration energy storage system designed to store surplus renewable electricity.

 

The pilot will be the UK’s first zinc-based long-duration energy storage (LDES) project using a battery manufactured entirely in Britain, according to the partners.

 

Offgrid Energy Labs, which manufactures ZincGel LDES batteries, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Keele to deploy the technology on the university’s campus.

 

The pilot system is expected to capture and store around 1 MWh of surplus renewable energy each month. The trial will assess the battery’s safety, depth of discharge and round-trip performance under real-world operating conditions.

 

The results will be used to develop plans for a larger, multi-megawatt-hour ZincGel installation at Keele, aimed at storing excess renewable electricity that might otherwise be curtailed.

 

Professor Raphael Hirschi, Director of Keele’s Digital Society Institute, said: “It is exciting to start working with Offgrid Energy Labs to address the challenges of renewable energy intermittency and long-duration energy storage. In the short term, we will validate the technology that Zinc-Bromine batteries offer to provide an important alternative to lithium-based technology for energy storage on the timescale of one day. In the longer term, we will explore storage on the timescales of a day as well as a full year.”

 

Offgrid Energy Labs says its ZincGel technology uses zinc-bromine chemistry and does not require lithium, cobalt or nickel. The company says the technology could help strengthen domestic battery manufacturing and reduce reliance on imported materials.

 

Tejas Kusurkar, Co-Founder of Offgrid Energy Labs, said: "We are pleased to announce our first pilot of ZincGel technology, in partnership with Keele University. The pilot is designed to show that the UK can manufacture long-duration batteries domestically, using a chemistry that needs no lithium, cobalt or nickel and no capex-heavy manufacturing infrastructure. It's an important step in bringing UK-manufactured long-duration storage to market, and we look forward to building on this partnership towards a larger deployment at Keele."

 

The project also has backing from the Energy Storage Association UK, whose chair, Baroness Luciana Berger, highlighted the potential impact on both battery supply chains and renewable energy curtailment.

 

Baroness Luciana Berger, Chair of the Energy Storage Association, said: "It's great to see Keele University and Offgrid Energy Labs join forces, brought together through shared membership of the Energy Storage Association UK and the LDES working group, to deploy ZincGel batteries on campus. Offgrid's technology will derisk the battery supply chain by reducing our dependence on imports, while helping to cut curtailment costs for Keele's Low Carbon Energy Generation Park. This is what great collaboration looks like."

 

If successful, the pilot could pave the way for a much larger battery installation at Keele, helping the campus store more of its renewable generation and demonstrating the potential of UK-manufactured long-duration storage technology.