Norfolk villagers 'losing sleep' over battery farm plan
Villagers said they were "losing sleep" over plans for one of the UK's largest battery storage sites.Elmya Energy wants to house batteries in more than 1,000 containers on farmland at Rushall near Diss, Norfolk.Parish councillor Lisa Buck said she was concerned there was "a high risk" the facility – which would store power generated by wind and solar farms – could catch fire.Elmya – which has yet to submit its plans for the Dodd's Wood site – said it would have "advanced monitoring, early fire detection, and suppression systems".
Battery energy storage systems (BESS) are used to stockpile excess energy from renewables and then release it when the power is needed most.The electricity is held inside Lithium-ion batteries which are housed in structures similar to shipping containers.
With a growing number of solar projects proposed – including a number of "mega-farms" in Norfolk – more storage is needed for the energy they generate.But concerns are being increasingly raised about potential fire risks, because of the lithium within the batteries, which can cause an explosion when it overheats.A fire at a small BESS site in Liverpool in 2020 took fire crews 59 hours to extinguish, whilst a blaze at a huge site in California was left to burn on the advice of fire experts.
Buck said people in Rushall had been "terrified" and were losing sleep since being told of the plans for land on the outskirts of their village."There's a high risk of them catching fire."
Fellow villager Nigel Webber said he "wanted to be able to support" a renewable energy project, but was deeply concerned about how emergency services could access such a development in a remote area."We're talking about one of the most dangerous, volatile, reactive elements on the planet."
Spain-based Elmya said the Dodd's Wood site would be able to store enough power for 60,000 homes for up to three days and "would make a significant contribution to energy security"With 900MW capacity and batteries housed in 1,035 large containers, it would be significantly bigger than existing sites like the Drax facility in Yorkshire.Development director James Innes insisted the project's safety was "paramount" and the company would be "following National Fire Chiefs Council guidance".He added the company had sought feedback from 1,140 homes."We are now reviewing that feedback in order to create the final design of our scheme ahead of submitting a planning application."
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And it's not only DORA, there is GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], there is CCPA [California Consumer Privacy Act], and a host of other regulations. Add to that a disaster recovery mindset, necessitated by the presence of primary/secondary architecture, and you've got a perpetuation.' So how can organisations go beyond the minimum requirements of DORA to develop holistic operational resilience strategies? Developing modern resilience strategies For organisations running primary/secondary architecture, failovers and failbacks are key concepts of resilience and disaster recovery. A failover is the process of switching to a backup, secondary system or site when the primary architecture fails – ensuring business continuity – while failback refers to the process of returning to the primary system once the issue is resolved. Reid explained that many organisations are running primary/secondary architectures 'with the hope that things don't go wrong. Because if something goes wrong, they need to fail over, and that is risky. Some businesses never fail back because of the risk associated in failing back to the primary architecture. However, hope is not a strategy. Modern and capable technology must be considered if we are to move beyond the traditional primary/secondary failover mindset, and businesses should be considering technologies that minimise RTO and RPO.' RTO (recovery time objective) is the amount of time that an organisation will be down following an outage, which, according to Reid, should be measured in seconds, not minutes or hours. RPO (recovery point objective) is the amount of data that an organisation loses in an outage. 'And that should be zero,' he argued. 'Let's assume you have a traditional database that you are backing up every hour. That's up to one hour of data that you're going to permanently lose in the event of an outage, simply because you didn't back up more regularly within that time window.' Thinking beyond the primary/secondary architecture approach, self-healing technology is the more modern approach in achieving effective operational resilience. Referring to applications that are capable of detecting, diagnosing, and repairing their own issues without human intervention, self-healing technology – made even more powerful through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) – enables organisations to better manage their systems' availability. Crucially, self-healing technology can work both reactively as well as preventatively which, according to Reid, is not just important for systems, but for employees as well. In order to achieve reliable availability, the mindset within organisation needs to start rewarding prevention more than finding solutions to existing issues: 'Do employees get more recognition for putting out fires, or do they get more recognition for preventing fires in the first place? Preventing fires will inevitably be a lot less visible if the reward culture celebrates firefighting,' emphasised Reid. 'Businesses can and should be adopting self-healing and distributed technologies. This places the burden of operational resilience on software instead of people, and that frees people up to innovate.' Operational resilience in 2025 and beyond In 2025, downtime is no longer tenable. Resilience, in its many forms, must be made a priority. A failure to comprehensively overhaul and modernise systems and processes will inevitably incur disruptions. 'DORA is the recognition that the status quo isn't doing enough to keep businesses online, and it should be seen as an opportunity,' finalised Reid. 'DORA will shore up trust in the industry as a whole, and each of those businesses that work within it are going to contribute to that. I have watched organisations reap the benefits of self-healing applications. Modern technology has the potential to completely revolutionise the way we approach operational resilience.' It is now imperative for financial institutions – both banks and regulated, non-bank financial institutions – to ensure business continuity meets organisational needs in an increasingly volatile global environment.
