KrakenFlex optimising Emirates Stadium's 2.6MW battery
Arsenal are on a mission to become “the most sustainable football club”. To help them on their journey, we partnered up in 2016, powering all their facilities with 100% renewable energy, reducing their carbon footprint (and their energy bills) in the process. Now, thanks to KrakenFlex, a groundbreaking service offered as part of Octopus Energy’s Kraken tech platform (which now powers all of our 3.1 million customers, and 14 million others worldwide), we’re helping them take another step towards their noble goal. We’ve long been proud of our partnership with Arsenal. Through powering the Emirates Stadium, London Colney training ground and the Hale End Youth Academy, we’ve prevented 11.5 million kg of carbon from entering the atmosphere, which is enough to fill Emirates Stadium more than seven times over. We’ve even launched the Arsenal Green tariff so fans can benefit from the same green electricity that powers the stadium (winning Arsenal prizes in the process), and installed EV chargers in the Emirates car park, encouraging Gunners to go electric and travel to the stadium in sustainable ways. These days, the partnership has expanded far beyond energy supply. Octopus have helped Arsenal to hold sustainability classes for local children through Arsenal in the Community and planted 500 trees at the training ground, adding to the 29,000 that have been planted since 1999 to make Colney Wood.
Stadium storage: Emirates energy
However, perhaps the most exciting moment of our partnership came when the Emirates became the first UK Premier League stadium to install a large-scale battery. The 2.6MWh battery (owned in partnership with Downing LLP) can store enough green electricity to power the stadium for an entire match. This way, Arsenal has been able to massively reduce their energy bills, storing energy when it’s cheap, and running off that energy (rather than the grid) when it’s more expensive. But now, thanks to KrakenFlex, they’ve been able to go even further... Enter KrakenFlex KrakenFlex is now working alongside Octopus Energy’s Kraken platform to control and optimize the Arsenal battery remotely. KrakenFlex’s unique mix of advanced technology and commercial intelligence ensures that clients like Arsenal can make the most of assets like the Arsenal Battery.
In other words, KrakenFlex has meant that there are now several new ways Arsenal can use their battery to get paid for being green. For example, KrakenFlex has enabled Arsenal to sign their battery up to the National Grid’s ‘Dynamic Containment’ service. To give a bit of background, the National Grid must always be ‘well balanced’, maintaining a frequency of around 50HZ. If energy supply drops below demand there can be power cuts, and if supply exceeds demand, it can damage grid infrastructure. This becomes even more important as we build more ‘intermittent sources’ like solar and wind farms, that we can’t just turn on whenever we want to meet demand for electricity. Given that games at Arsenal happen relatively infrequently, the Arsenal Battery can be called upon to discharge to the grid whenever the UK is in danger of being ‘short’ of energy. This way, Arsenal are getting paid to help make renewable energy generation work on a massive sale!
On top of this, KrakenFlex works with Octopus Energy’s tech platform, Kraken, to provide comprehensive billing for these complex services. It enables a clear breakdown of import, export and optimization costs, and allows Octopus to provide settlement reports and cost breakdowns. This way, there are no secrets - the battery’s performance can easily be monitored, and Arsenal can easily understand where money is being made, and costs are incurred.
So what’s next?
This year, Octopus Energy and Arsenal extended our partnership for a further three years. With that in mind, we’re more determined than ever to help Arsenal become the most sustainable football club around, and KrakenFlex’s cutting edge service is just the beginning.