To provide the green power for the increasing adoption of Electric Vehicles and to start to decarbonise the heating for homes and places of work, Northern Ireland needs to double its renewable generating capacity in the next ten years. To do so effectively will require the intermittency of supply that accompanies renewables to be addressed. This can be done by deploying large scale batteries across the province. The sites selected will need to have major electricity grid connections.
These are hard to obtain and expensive to create but the good news is that NI Water already owns over 3,000 widely distributed grid connected sites. The major sites could be used to deploy batteries. The income from their operation would not only help to reduce the costs for water services but also ensure that electricity customers will not have to pay an energy company to replicate these existing assets. Electricity and water customers are the same people - why should they have to pay twice?
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