UK-based maritime consortium MSE International has published a White Paper on the optimum port battery storage options for various port use cases in order to facilitate the decarbonisation of vessels for 2030.
The research received funding from the Department for Transport’s (DfT), Transport Research and Innovation Grant (TRIG) 2022 delivered by Connected Places Catapult. The project, known as ‘ESSOP’, has compared a variety of port energy storage options and has modelled how these options could be best deployed in order to deliver a financial benefit to the port.
With ports coming under growing pressure to decarbonise, access is needed to ever-increasing amounts of electrical energy in order to meet both their own and their customer’s increasing requirements including; supplying shore power to vessels at berth to help meet their carbon indexing obligations, decarbonising the port infrastructure (cranes, buildings, vehicles etc) and recharging electrically propelled vessels when at berth. Ensuring availability of these electrical resources to meet loads which are intermittent and uncertain is becoming a critical port function which requires investment in multi-vector energy supply chains, energy storage and associated energy management systems.
The ESSOP project considered six different energy storage technologies; three of which were discarded for reasons of limited commercial readiness at scale, leaving three contenders; Lithium-ion, Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries (VRFB) and hybrid Lithium-ion/lead-acid. An energy flow model was built to compare the cost-effectiveness of these technologies and to explore how battery sizing could be optimised, using a levelised cost of storage methodology.
The White Paper looks at the challenges involved, the options for batteries and the optimisation of energy costs for a trial use case of a harbour authority seeking to decarbonise their vessel operations. The five month project concluded that an optimally-sized smart battery can reduce energy costs by prioritising when power is procured from the grid and by maximising use of PV solar generation. Furthermore, for ports facing multiple peak loads during each day, the durability of VRFBs make them the more cost-effective battery option. The optimal solution for a port depends on multiple factors including; the capacity of the grid connection and cost of potential expansion of connection capacity; access to in-port renewable energy resources; types of vessel requiring shore power and their duty cycle.
The ESSOP decision support model allows ports to investigate the optimal mix of battery power rating, energy capacity and PV solar to achieve a minimum levelised cost of energy delivered to shore power systems. The project showed that although batteries are presently quite costly and introduce round-trip losses, the use of battery storage can be attractive for some use cases. The ESSOP model allows for PV solar deployment to be optimised, to ensure that 100% of solar energy can be utilised whilst offering the greatest overall reduction in cost of energy.
The White Paper can be downloaded here https://mseinternational.org/res/files/decarbonisation/ESSOP%20White%20Paper.2023.pdf.
