A pioneering project using electric vehicles to power community buildings during outages caused by storms is being rolled out across Eden.
A number of trial sites in Eden are taking part in a Rural Energy Resilience project funded by Innovate UK which is looking at novel ways to keep the lights on at buildings which can be used as emergency hubs when power cuts occur.
Alston’s Tyne Willows Pavilion, which is a community building where the town’s gym is based, is a trial site, as is the Toppin Memorial Hall at Skelton and Bampton village hall, near Shap.
Each building will have a special car charger which is capable of taking the current from the battery of an electric vehicle (EV) and pushing it back into the building.
Daniel Heery, a director of Cybermoor and Charge My Street, said: “The beauty of this solution, and why we are so excited about it, is because when it is not being used in emergencies, the charger can actually be used to charge an electric car.”
Hopefully, this will also mean that electric vehicle charging facilities can be made more widely available.
Last month, an information day took place in Alston Town Hall which saw an enthusiastic response and in the surrounding area about five volunteers have already signed up to take part.
The project, which is set to start after Christmas, will see a volunteer with an electric car go down to the Tyne Willows Pavilion, plug it in and provide back-up power in the event of an outage.
Daniel explained that electric cars have powerful batteries which can keep a house going for about five days.
Because of its location, Alston is vulnerable to power cuts during extreme weather.
Some resilience has already been established on Alston Moor, with generators for the town hall and Nenthead and Garrigill village halls funded by Electricity North West’s Storm Arwen Fund.
The Rural Energy Resilience project aims to make rural communities self sustaining in emergencies.
Daniel added: “It is a way for local towns and villages to take matters into their own hands rather than having to rely on engineers travelling up from Preston and Manchester.
“They can also help balance the grid in rural areas which is a big challenge, as more people are using electricity for things like heat pumps.
“We use all this spare capacity which is in people’s car batteries to get us out of some quite tricky situations.”
This technology first started to be seriously developed in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 when the Japanese government worked with Nissan to develop a solution.
“But it has been quite slow on the take up in this country, partly because there had not been that many electric vehicles on the road.
“You need a bit of a critical mass of cars to make this work and as we have seen the take-up of electric vehicles increase over the last two or three years with all the government subsidies, we recognised that there was an opportunity where they could really fill a gap,” said Daniel.
Since 2011, 4,460 battery powered vehicles have been registered in Eden.
“That’s 178MWh of energy storage capacity (based on a 40kWh EV battery) with potential to power 17,800 homes or 80% of homes in Eden for 24 hours,” said Daniel.
At present, not all models of electric car can support this new technology, but already in UK there are about 150,000 vehicles which can.
Going forward, Daniel said discussions were happening with Westmorland and Furness and Cumberland councils to see which other locations and village halls could benefit from the installation of this car/building charging technology.
Communities interested in getting involved should contact hello@chargemystreet.co.uk or visit https://ruralenergyresilience.org.uk/
