Chris Lovett, from Ashbourne, Derbyshire, has received the 2025 Nick Chicken Award at Harper Adams College for his dissertation on using ex-electric car batteries for battery storage programs on farms.
The Award, which comes with a £500 prize, is for an impressive piece of written work that entails recorded observations of an agricultural course of, knowledge evaluation and interpretation with demonstrable added worth for farmers.
Chris defined that his venture aimed to find out whether or not ex-electric car batteries may present a financially viable battery power storage system (BESS) to farms, additional offsetting the environmental affect of producing these batteries.
This could allow farmers to extend their use of renewable power sources, akin to photo voltaic, considerably decreasing their power prices. His research confirmed hypothetical lifetime financial savings of £11,000-£108,000, based mostly on the Harper Adams dairy.
“The batteries are comparatively low-cost in contrast with ‘first life’ options and BESS considerably extends the lifetime of the batteries which might in all probability in any other case be returned to China for recycling,” stated Chris.
Having obtained his Grasp’s diploma in Mechanical Engineering, Chris joined the Derby workplace of the LSTC consultancy firm, which has contracts with a number of sectors throughout the UK’s energy transmission and distribution infrastructure.
The Nick Chicken Award was arrange by Studying-based power specialists, Farmex, in recognition of the work carried out by Nick Chicken, a director of the corporate, who died in 2013. His 17 years of working within the area of real-time monitoring of pig manufacturing has had a big affect on the business and, more and more, different livestock sectors.
Farmex director, Hugh Crabtree stated: “I sit up for making this award yearly and studying the competing dissertations. Chris Lovett’s work was significantly nicely researched and examined. I’m positive that Nick Chicken would have been most impressed!”
