Our new facility is home to a LCOS-friendly, powerful 2 MW / 1 MWh lithium titanate system. This system is one of the earliest independent grid-connected Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) of its kind in the UK. It’s home to a 100 kW second-life electric vehicle (EV) battery platform. This resource serves as the foundation to advance research for reuse, repurposing and circular-economy approaches. This pioneering arrangement lets researchers engage immediately with real-world grid operations. For one, they can react to true market demands and improve their output with real-world experience.
Professor Gladwin’s research concentrates on delivering reliable state-of-charge (SOC), state-of-health (SOH), and state-of-performance (SOP) estimates during rapid power swings and irregular cycling. His team’s work has shown great promise in off-grid environments, broadening the potential applications of their diagnostics.
Advanced Research Capabilities
The University of Sheffield’s facility hosts a remarkable 11 kV, 4 MW connection to the grid. This configuration provides important electrical and operational fidelity for performing cutting-edge diagnostics. The research team runs storage assets on the real-time, operating grid. This enables them to see how these systems perform and respond to market forces and shocks like they would in a commercial environment.
Professor Gladwin emphasizes the importance of real-world testing, stating, “The ability to test at scale, under real operational conditions, is what gives us insights that simulation alone cannot provide.” He further explains that understanding how storage behaves requires exposing it to actual grid conditions, noting that “phenomena that never appear in a lab can dominate behavior at megawatt scale.”
To enhance their research, Professor Gladwin’s team has developed hybrid physics-machine learning forecasting models and mitigation strategies at both the cell and module levels. These models and strategies equip researchers to understand thermal gradients present in containerized systems. As a result, they’re able to illuminate greater insights into performance and reliability.
Collaboration with Industry Partners
To achieve these goals, Professor Gladwin collaborates with various industry partners. Their combined insight helps bridge rigorous, controlled laboratory research and the very real, day-to-day requirements of grid operations. One of these exciting partnerships is MOPO. This company has made a unique commitment to accelerating the deployment of pay-per-swap lithium-ion battery packs in low-income communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Combined with their unique outreach capabilities, this collaboration will help deliver clean, affordable energy solutions to communities currently dependent on petrol and diesel generators.
“It is a two-way relationship. We bring the analytical and research tools, while industry brings the operational context and scale,” Professor Gladwin explains. The research team looks forward to deepening this collaboration. For one, they will apply their rich experience to ensure that battery-swap packs aren’t just quicker, cleaner, but significantly more cost-effective to underserved communities.
Her facility’s infrastructure—not only the physical space but the connections her facility cultivates—provides a seamless exchange of information between academia and industry. Professor Gladwin remarked that “that project showed us just how fast and capable storage could be when properly integrated into the grid.” By exploiting this synergy, the University of Sheffield plans to apply cutting-edge energy storage research even further.
Practical Applications and Future Prospects
The cutting-edge research that will be carried out at this facility promises to have major impact for the energy storage industry. The group specializes in hybrid assets techno-economic modeling and dispatch optimization by means of evolutionary algorithms. Their mission is to create smart solutions that will improve the safety and long-term commercial appeal of energy storage technologies.
Professor Gladwin asserts that “a model is only as good as the data and conditions that shape it.” He advocates strongly for confidence when it comes to predicting battery lifetime. To achieve this, he stresses the importance of combining laboratory measurements with full-scale testing and validation in real-world operating conditions. This multi-pronged approach based on demand will lead to more reliable, robust energy storage technologies. Ultimately, these solutions will go further to satisfy the needs of today’s evolving energy systems.