Recorded webinar
Breaking Down Barriers to Electrification in Food & Drink with Battery Energy Storage (BESS)
24 July 2025
In this webinar, Powerstar explores how Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are playing a critical role in decarbonising the sector - helping producers, manufacturers, retailers and the wider supply chain overcome energy constraints, electrify operations, and store cleaner, cheaper energy.
For any further questions please contact James Hampshire.
Topics
Powerstar - Breaking Down Barriers to Electrification in Food & Drink with Battery Energy Storage (BESS)
Powerstar - Breaking Down Barriers to Electrification in Food & Drink with Battery Energy Storage (BESS)
0:02
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, which is on breaking down barriers to electrification in food and drink with battery energy storage systems, which is hosted by our professional affiliate members, Powerstar.
0:14
First of all, thank you to everyone for coming today.
0:17
We hope that you find the content useful.
0:19
There will be a Q &A at the end of the session, so please put any questions that you have into the questions box, and we'll do our best to go through as many as we can at the end of the webinar.
0:28
Following today's webinar, we'll be sending you an article email in the next couple of days and this will contain a recording of the webinar, a copy of the slides and the contact details of StagePerCenter.
0:38
So without any further ado I'll hand you over to StagePerCenter, James Hampshire.
0:44
Good morning, thank you Luke, thank you everyone for attending this morning.
0:48
I'm James Hampshire, I'm principal engineer here at Powerstar, so I look after a lot of the technology roadmap, how we integrate it on customer sites and ensure that what we deliver brings value to the industry.
1:05
So without further ado, I'd like to spend some time this morning just going through high level what battery energy storage systems can do in the food and drink application and where we've got applications of this technology in use because these best systems, battery energy storage systems, is a bit of a hot topic.
1:27
It's a buzz word that's thrown around and they have a lot of negative connotations, a lot of positive connotations, so today's is a little bit of going, what can we do and how can it benefit different industries, well, different applications within the industry is where we go.
1:45
So again, fairly high level, a little bit of an introduction to best what it is, what it can do.
1:51
But other than that, we're not going to do too much of a deep dive or go into too much technical detail if that's something that would be of interest, then more than happy to do that after the call on a separate occasion.
2:03
But let's get crapped on, we've only got half an hour, so let's get going.
2:11
So first off, just a little bit of the corporate stuff about Power Star, who we are.
2:16
We're part of a group of businesses called D20 based out of Aberdeen.
2:22
Sheffield is where Power Star is located with an office in Bronze Grove, South Birmingham.
2:30
And within our collective of businesses of the D20 group, we are here as a decarbonization outfit.
2:41
Now, whether that's looking at alternative fuel source, like hydrogen and fuel source systems with their technologies within hydrogen, whether you're working with the sister company Score Group, looking at the gaseous systems and we're looking at lossless valves or whether you work with Power Star and you're looking to electrify to remove gas based systems and that's what we're here to do.
3:05
So the whole purpose of D20 is decarbonisation of critical infrastructure around the world.
3:16
Power Star is the electrification arm to the business.
3:21
So we're here to support and deliver infrastructure and technologies to enable the decarbonisation of manufacturing operations and critical infrastructure.
3:35
So I have here the three challenges that we get asked across all industries, whether it's the food and drink manufacturing industry, it could be heavy industry where it's more general manufacturing sort of machining.
3:50
We also then look at pharmaceutical companies.
3:53
This, what we've named it here in Power Start is the trilemma, which is we've got rising energy costs, we've got a drive for decarbonization, and we've got barriers to electrification or alternative fuel systems that hinder the decarbonization, but the costs are obviously are going up and up and up.
4:15
So it's getting harder and harder and harder to, sorry, it's getting more prevalent to reduce the energy consumption or use energy better.
4:25
So we're here today to provide a solution or talk about a solution that we have that can help with all three of these, dependent on people's energy costs.
4:35
But again, just touching on the rising energy costs, 10% of your energy is typically wasted on inefficiencies on site. So again, we have technologies to support with that.
4:48
And obviously the energy cost is an OPEX. It's a cost that we don't really want.
4:54
It's also a cost that we can't push onto consumers or don't want to be pushing onto consumers.
4:59
So being able to take it out or reduce it within the OPEX is something that's of big interest within the financial teams within businesses. The decarbonisation element is a huge thing.
5:12
The government and European Union is putting massive pressure on to reduce the amount of carbon and other emissions that industry is emitting into the atmosphere or into the river systems.
5:29
So what we're here do is give you solutions that enable you to reduce your carbon footprint in various different ways.
5:40
But then the barriers that you have from the National Grid from your local power networks is really, I wouldn't say stopping, but delaying, you know, it's a bit of resistance you could say in the process of decarbonisation and also to reduce the energy cost.
5:59
So again, these is the good old engineering triangle, as I like to say, you can have it fast, cheap or good, and you can have two, but not the third, but we all want this third one.
6:10
So putting different technologies in that have been widely known around for quite a long time and to enable.
6:19
And I think the key word, if anyone takes this away, is enable, and that's what PowerStar's here to do.
6:27
So, just to drop quickly onto the three technologies that PowerStar mainly have, we have the ultra-low loss transformers, we have our voltage optimisation and then the main topic today is the battery energy storage.
6:50
So a few weeks ago I had a little talk about voltage optimisation, I'll do that in a quick But it's a transformer-based technology that we can put on to people's facilities and that will reduce the incoming voltage and make your equipment run more efficiently, therefore saving yourself the energy that was basically getting wasted.
7:12
So that's a similar thing to what we do with the transformers, where we put more physical transformers and ultra-efficient transformers, so you stop the transformer losses.
7:21
So that's one system that is mainly or sorry two systems that we've put in place that's fairly intrusive and fairly inexpensive cost.
7:30
So typically before we start looking at say renewables and start looking at battery, they're the two things that we look at first because again you pay back so much quicker, the more easy to implement and the more accessible.
7:43
But if you've done that and you are looking at renewables and we are looking to solve that or you have some problems with the grid, then battery energy storage is something that's going to be right up the street for you.
8:02
So we have three main topics of the battery and storage systems that we are going to demonstrate or explain to you today.
8:17
The batteries can be used in much more applications than what we're just going to talk about today that you don't need 30 minutes.
8:27
I'd need three hours to go through every single possible variation and more of what we can do with with with battery systems and how they can help.
8:34
But these are three main main pillars.
8:37
Also, these are the three main systems that, you know, enable the the the the the access to those to resolve in them, three challenges that we we spoke about at the start.
8:50
So we're going to talk about, as you can see, grid constraints, renewable firming, uninterruptible power supplies as the three main ones.
9:01
And we've got some short animations to talk through how we do that.
9:06
But just looking at what we can do on these four little topics here.
9:11
Reducing grid prices.
9:13
So this is fundamental battery 101 that everybody's heard about because we can do it at home is the old economy seven tariff, where you can charge at a cheaper pence per kilowatt hour at night, and then discharge through the day.
9:27
So offsetting your energy bill.
9:29
Yes, that is definitely something that can be done with a battery.
9:34
But doing that alone never really pays back at the scale of what people are looking to achieve.
9:41
Again, as people get PPAs and CPAs and different pricing agreements, the night rate and day rate, the disparity being between prices is necessarily there, so you're not getting as much benefit.
9:55
However, being able to pair that with a grid constraint that you have, or you've got renewables on site and you want to use more of them, or you have a power supply or an incoming supply from the national grid that's not particularly secure, it's not particularly reliable and pairing it with an uninterruptible power supply is another way that you add another layer of commercialisation to the battery.
10:25
So not only are you saving money on your energy bills, you're also then saving money on loss of production or you're using all the renewables that you are generating or you're not having to pay the national grid an extortionate amount of money to pay for a bigger supply on to site, Things like that, so the batteries aren't there to do just one thing, we kind of layer different applications, different technologies, because if we think about what a battery is that it's most simple for, it's something that stores energy, pairing that with an inverter and a power conversion system that allows us to charge and discharge, and that's all the battery systems really doing in hardware, it's the control system of how we implement them into sites that allow us to add these different layers.
11:14
Because again, the hardware is the same.
11:17
It's just the metering game.
11:19
It's the control side to it all that really adds the different layers to it.
11:26
So first things first is this renewable firming application that we have.
11:31
So there's lots and lots of places that I've visited and I've been to where we have large PV arrays.
11:37
We have wind turbines on site.
11:39
and where during the day when it's windy or during the day when the sun's out is fantastic because the facility can use the energy and it can not have to import from the grid.
11:52
There's a couple of different challenges that we find with this is one, in the summer it's still light till 10 o 'clock at night and I know a lot of factories are 24-7 or 24-6 something like that, they can use a lot of the energy.
12:09
However, there is still often a lot of overspill energy.
12:13
So a lot of the time, the PV arrays and the wind arrays, all that energy that's been generated isn't being used.
12:21
And that's not because the factories can't absorb the energy, it's just the production schedule might be slightly off, or this certain machine's not having that, this line's not growing today, or this maintenance here.
12:32
That overspill energy, and you'll export that at two or three pence a kilowatt hour, maybe seven pence a kilowatt hour is one of the higher rates that I've seen, but that energy that you're exporting could be hundreds of kilowatt hours, you're then importing that back in at nearly 20 pence a kilowatt hour.
12:49
So actually what we can do is we can store that overspill, that excess energy in one of these battery energy storage systems, we can connect it into the grid as well, so we can charge up at night to use the night's tariff where possible and then we can use that energy to export back into your facility during the day so you'll get a hundred percent usage or sorry as close to a hundred percent usage of your renewables as little grid input as you can achieve and we'll all moderate that through the battery.
13:25
So this is another buzzword where we start talking about micro grids.
13:29
You wouldn't necessarily have what we call an islanding function where we can disconnect from the grid, but this is sort of the start of the basics of micro gridding, you could say. So this is a really popular application of battery systems.
13:49
It's probably one of the more common ones that we come across day in, day out.
13:58
The next problem is grid constraints.
14:03
I've come across this a lot in my day-to-day, specifically within the food and drink manufacturing industry, where gas ovens are very prevalent.
14:20
They're massive massive massive drive to remove these ovens and replace them with either an electrified solution or whether it's a alternative fuel solution being hydrogen.
14:35
Now one technology is more proven than the other so obviously the electrification move is very well proven and the hydrogen solution isn't isn't quite proven you know that if people don't know much hydrogen and it's a very small molecule it can leak out it's all welded stainless steel pipes there's no flanges or no bolts of ****** so cost of ownership of hydrogen is really high and whereas they're looking at electrification solution and it's more achievable it's more accessible to everyone but what the big challenge is is that's a huge load for example I was working with a customer and they're looking at replacing their gas lungs for electricals it's an additional eight megawatts load is huge.
15:20
The national grid in the area can't support the increasing capacity that they need.
15:30
So that's kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place of saying, well, I can't use a hydrogen-based system because the technology is not as reliable or not as available for me. I also can't electrify this process, so what can I do?
15:49
And it's just running on natural gas, or gas off the gas network.
15:55
So the grid is also a large limiting factor in this.
16:00
This is hopefully going to improve with the great grid upgrade that National Grid is implementing over the next few years. However, we need it now.
16:09
We've needed it for long time.
16:11
So what we can do is we can support the facility from this site with battery energy storage systems.
16:21
So we can take up that excess, we can take up that over demand and take that away from the national grid.
16:30
So what you'll see on this slide here is that the factory is electrified and we've changed the processes that are on the side and we've removed the gas with more electrification in there but the national grid can't support that.
16:50
It's not available for whatever reason whether it's the local substation needs to be upgraded and they're asking for multi-million pounds worth of your cash to upgrade their infrastructure or it's just physically possible and what what you've got here is then the grid dropping out we could say so the grid still there and still available it's just dropping out you could say it's becoming intermittent so you've got a 2 ,000 kVA supply from the national grid and your sign down requires 2 ,500 kVA so what we do in this instance is that we support the grid with a battery and so we can put a battery, but a much larger battery on site.
17:34
But it really depends on what power is required and what kind of headroom or additional expansion the facilities require.
17:43
Now, typically the average running current, you could say the RMS current of the facility, is much less what your site demand is.
17:53
That 2 ,500 kVA would be sort of peak or instantaneous or when you to power up. However, you have to accommodate for that. You can't ask for an RMF supply.
18:02
You have to get what your peak demand is.
18:04
So what typically happens is the startup period or through high intensity or high usage periods, the battery will be discharging into the facility.
18:15
So you'll be drawing as much energy from the national grid as you can, and then the battery will be there. Just give me that little bit of extra to make sure the equipment's running.
18:25
As your usage starts to curtail, the battery will then start to charge the energy back from the grid or whether there's renewables on site and we can start using the renewable energy that's on site as well.
18:37
As you can see this factory has a PV array and we can start them up to use renewables as well.
18:44
So this once again, early touch range is like layering the battery system of what it can do.
18:50
But either way, you then have a facility that no longer has a grid constraint.
18:56
You can add in different and more electrification technologies, and it then enables you to stop using gas systems, or it will enable you to reduce your carbon footprint by electrifying your processes.
19:12
So that again is one solution that we have for facilities with grid constraints.
19:22
So this one and the renewable firmament start, again the hardware is very much the same throughout both of them.
19:30
Again, it's a control software, it's a metering game that we're talking about where we put these different layers.
19:37
Now, the last one, now this one starts getting a little bit more complex in terms of the technology of the batteries, you could say.
19:48
This is where the hardware starts to change, but you can still do the renewable thermals, you can still overcome your grid constraints, but with the UPS, each function as a UPS is an uninterruptible power supply.
20:01
Its function is to make sure the critical infrastructure or your whole facility is kept online in any form of power outages.
20:10
So again, as we talk about grid constraints in the previous one, there's instabilities in the grid at the moment because there's a lot of overloading going on, there's a lot of overcrowding on the local distribution networks at the moment, which then puts these irregularities onto the grid.
20:27
A lot of people we speak to are saying, we're having more brown house or black house than before.
20:32
So one of the things that we offer here is a UPS function that will facilitate keeping your factory online.
20:40
So the typical way that's done at the moment is a diesel generator is usually installed.
20:48
So the grid disappears, the grid fails and your diesel generator notices and it starts and that's 30 seconds that it would take to start on.
20:59
And it's also emitting lots of nitrous oxide gases, lots of CO2, so it's not particularly environmentally friendly either, but 30 seconds.
21:09
30 seconds is enough for safety circuits to trip out.
21:12
So that means the production machine will stop.
21:15
And a lot of applications that we do are the mixing applications, the motors will seize, there's potential for produce to point the lines.
21:28
Either way, it's not just a 30 second downtime.
21:31
It's the cleaning out, it's the restarting of the process that can last from anywhere from one hour to 10 hours.
21:37
Working with a business the other day, they had a 50 millisecond brownout that tripped the safety circuits and it took them 13 hours to get the site back up and running by the time you've gone through all the drives, reset all the faults, and cleared all the product out of all of the material out of the system.
21:56
So it seems like it's not that big of a thing, a little blip in the grid, but actually, oh, sorry, 30 seconds of a diesel generator as we're starting up doesn't sound too detrimental.
22:08
However, it's the impact then after that.
22:13
So after the smoke's cleared from all the fumes from the diesel generator and all the coughing and spluttering that everyone will have done as it started up and you're waving your arms around just to try and see, PowerStars come and we've installed one of our uninterruptible power supplies onto the facility.
22:29
So again, these are typically container-based and it's only un-intrusive.
22:33
However, to be a UPS, it has to switch or come on to load, as I call it, within 20 milliseconds.
22:43
So grid goes, you're back up and running within 20 milliseconds.
22:49
you wouldn't even notice the light flickers.
22:53
20 milliseconds, the reason for 20 milliseconds is that the sinusoidal wave that AC wave for a cycle is, or two cycles is 20 milliseconds.
23:06
So the battery will come and take over straight away and you will be islanded from the grid.
23:11
For a period of time, we can be talking for 30 minutes, an hour, up to four or five hours depending on the size of the system.
23:18
We've got systems that can do, again, retail fronts, we're talking, excuse me, 50 kilowatts for two, three, four hours.
23:31
We're also facilitating sites, there's 2.5 megawatts for two hours, you know, there's no limitation to the size of what we can keep online.
23:43
However, this is most commonly found in sort of critical applications.
23:48
So as you can imagine, pharmaceutical industry is a massive user of this sort of technology, but also the food and drink industry as well has a lot of critical information.
23:59
And it's not necessarily the physical material product, it's the data.
24:04
And a lot of data centers have UPSs built in already, and that's within the IT network.
24:10
However, the OT network, your operational technology, that is your machinery, doesn't necessarily have the backup power there.
24:17
So all your discarder system and all the information that the machinery is capturing, that doesn't always progress into the IT cloud or into the IT network.
24:27
So having a UPS can keep, one, the data safe, the products going, and it stops you having excess downtime.
24:34
As the grid then comes back, the battery will naturally disconnect and charge back up again, and then it'd be ready for the next instance of outage.
24:44
So again, talking about layering, very, very much similar hardware.
24:51
The UPS, like I say, it's got a couple of additional parts inside it, but the hardware's there and thereabouts the same.
24:57
You can integrate this with PV, you can integrate this with wind, this can also overcome grid constraints.
25:02
So you know, one best system can tackle multiple problems for four sides, not just one.
25:12
So you wouldn't need a best for a UPS and a best for a renewable firm.
25:15
We can do it all on one network.
25:20
So we've got lots of product out here, out in the market, whether it's our VO systems, whether it's our transformers.
25:27
And the three that we've got here is one is Quorn, and that was a VO and transformer solution that we put in place.
25:36
So different to what we spoke about today.
25:39
However, it's a really good, big showcase for us as it was a fantastic successful project that we rolled out through the Quorn group.
25:47
Now you're gonna look at AES Seal and the NHS and go, well, they don't manufacture food and beverage products, but the technology is the same, application is the same.
25:59
So AES, we put a smaller battery system in for AES Seal, and that was to do renewable farming.
26:06
So that took the renewables that they had on site, that took PV and I believe wind, but it could be wrong, and then also supported them with overcoming good constraints and some form of backup power.
26:20
So that, using all of their energy, saved them £87 ,000 a year just on a little bit of PV that we've got and then also including into the the green.
26:30
So that was a really good project that pays back quite well and now we have our product throughout all of AASCO whether that's in the UK or other countries around the world.
26:40
And then the NHS that we have on the right hand side is our UPS application.
26:46
So we've got our country's powering critical infrastructure across NHS trusts up and down the country.
26:51
So, yes, it's 225k saved annually, and that's in operational costs, that's not necessarily in energy costs, that's in the cost it will be for all the brownouts that the sites were having.
27:06
Now, when we start talking about batteries, and this is something we are going to cover in another webinar, hopefully, and this is talking about now working with our partner NLX who offer commercialization and access to different energy markets that you can utilize the battery in for.
27:25
So not only can you use the battery to support your site, you can also use the battery to access flexibility revenue.
27:35
So demand services in this slide one.
27:38
So you can start doing frequency response, capacity market, demand services, balancing, wholesale trading.
27:43
What that means is you have your asset, NLX basically put that onto an energy stock market, you could say, and a different energy market.
27:53
I imagine it is a trading 212 account that will put bits of shares and stuff like that, but it's much more complex than that. And these guys generate revenue stream for your battery.
28:05
And so not only are you using all your renewable energy or supporting your grid and paying back, that you're also getting an additional revenue stream from the asset.
28:14
So this is something we'll go more in depth with, hopefully with NLX in a future webinar, if that will be of interest for people.
28:25
So bang on time for half past 10.
28:28
I know there was a lot of information that I've gone through and again, fairly high level.
28:33
And if there's anything that anyone wants more detail in or wants to understand in a little bit or depth, or whether battery systems work right for you, or you have a problem and you don't know if battery's right, feel free to get in touch with us.
28:51
So there's the info at powerstar.com email address there.
28:56
There's also the landline, more than happy for you to ring the landline.
29:00
I'm usually in the office Tuesday to Friday, ring the landline and ask to speak to myself.
29:06
I'm more than happy to talk you through what you can do with the battery and then put you in touch with the right people going forwards.
29:13
So is there, I don't know, I forgot time.
29:15
I'm pretty sure people probably need to leave.
29:17
So if there's any questions, I believe there's the question box down here.
29:27
Let's have a look.
29:29
We've got one.
29:30
So we had a question.
29:31
What typically is the ROI for these types of battery solutions?
29:35
So again, it really depends on how many layers you have added into the battery and whether you are looking at doing a revenue stream through someone like NLX.
29:45
So typically we're looking at five to six years is probably the average ballpark or is the target ballpark.
29:54
Again, we're not going to be down at the two or three year ROI that much more accessible or inexpensive technology is going to be.
30:05
You know, these are quite complex technologies and come with a price that is sympathetic towards that.
30:12
They're not overly expensive like they used to be when they first came out.
30:16
However, they are typically more expensive.
30:19
But we aim for a five to six year payback just on doing the layers within PowerStart, but then also looking at bringing NNLX along the journey and how we can generate revenue for you to bring that payback down something we can we can accommodate as well so but I'll be honest with you we've also we've also had we've also had a kind of a payback of in eight nine ten years and it just depends on the challenge and what the value is to you and so it really you know you can really really benefit in different ways Let's have a look here, another question here, so rapid electrification can pose huge challenges to business in the fast moving consumer goods sector, reliant on fossil fuels to provide high temperature heat, how would best this issue?
31:29
So again, that's a little bit how it comes down to how you look to move away from fossil fuel, so the high temperature heat.
31:38
Now, if you can do that with an electrification solution, whether that's an inductive heater or some form of resistive heat or something along those lines, the challenge will be to go from a fossil fuel to an electrification solution.
31:56
It's a huge power draw, it's quite a large power draw, so the BESS system would allow you to install that system with grid constraints on the national grid, so the battery itself obviously isn't going to generate the heat, however, it allows you to install an electrified solution to generate that heat if you are having problems with the national grid.
32:23
And the other then option of looking at the high temperature is then can hydrogen.
32:28
Hydrogen typically burns cooler than gas, I believe.
32:32
And so that's also another option.
32:35
But again, it's doing like a technology risk assessment within your business and to understand what's the what's the best solution for you.
32:51
I'm just trying to see if there's any more any more questions.
32:59
I don't think there is. So I think that's it.
33:06
So again, reach out to us if there's anything that you do want any further clarification on, or if I have missed one of your questions unfortunately the webinar panel is playing up a little bit for me here.
33:16
But yeah, feel free to reach out.
33:18
I hope this was of use and hopefully look forward to seeing you in the next one.
Overview
What you’ll discover:
- Why grid capacity is a major barrier to electrification and sustainability
- The 4 main use cases of energy storage systems
- How BESS can act as a buffer and unlock flexibility across your site
- Practical steps to reduce reliance on natural gas and use cleaner energy
- Real-world examples of how energy storage can support decarbonisation without waiting for infrastructure upgrades
Speakers
Speakers
James Hampshire - Principal Engineer
With over 10 years of experience across multiple sectors, James is a highly skilled engineer specialising in decarbonisation and energy security. Starting out as an apprentice, he has since dedicated his career to driving sustainable solutions and supporting businesses worldwide in their transition to cleaner energy.
As Powerstar’s Principal Engineer, James helps businesses in the food and drink industry identify energy-saving opportunities and make progress on their net-zero journey.
From on-site surveys and client meetings to offering technical advice and practical recommendations, James makes advanced technologies, like battery energy storage systems, easy to understand and implement.
His commitment to delivering value-driven electrification solutions that combine technical excellence with real-world outcomes is helping to push decarbonisation forward in the energy sector.
