With about a third of UK electricity generated from wind turbines, many located off the Cumbrian coast, people might wonder, ‘What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?’

More often than not, we have the opposite problem. Wind turbines are often switched off on windy nights when electricity demand is low. It’s called curtailment, and it's a wasteful and costly approach.

EnergyCloud, an Irish charity, has a clever solution. It’s running a pilot scheme to harness the excess electrical energy from turbines to heat domestic hot water tanks in social housing overnight. This not only uses otherwise wasted energy but also helps to tackle energy poverty.

Learners on the level 4 Mechanical Engineering HNC have been investigating the feasibility of rolling out the EnergyCloud approach across the UK. By calculating the energy curtailed for different scenarios, they have estimated the number of hot water tanks heated and, hence, the number of households that a scaled-up scheme could support.

For houses without hot water tanks, learners have also looked at charging “heat batteries,” which store electrical energy in phase-change materials. Imagine a much bigger version of those pocket-sized hand warmers that transition between solid and liquid states to absorb or emit heat.

This is just one example of how the principles and practices of sustainability are being embedded within the teaching and learning activities of our Green Skills Academy.

This project has links with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, in particular:

SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy)
SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities)
SDG 13 (Climate action)