Giant Batteries Will Provide Surge Of Electricity Storage
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Times.
These are the first two paragraphs.
Britain’s capacity to store electricity in giant batteries is set to double after dozens of new projects won contracts through a government scheme to keep the lights on.
Developers of battery storage projects with a total output capacity of at least 3.3 gigawatts won contracts to operate from winter 2025-26 through the government’s “capacity market” auction, according to Cornwall Insight, the consultancy.
Note that Hinckley Point C is only 3.26 GW.
The biggest battery in these contracts is a giant that Intergen will be building at the London Gateway.
When the battery got planning permission in November 2020, Intergen published this press release, which is entitled InterGen Gains Consent To Build One Of The World’s Largest Battery Projects In Essex.
These are three bullet points at the head of the press release.
- Edinburgh-headquartered energy company InterGen has been granted planning consent to build the UK’s largest battery storage project at DP World London Gateway on the Thames Estuary.
- £200m project is set to provide at least 320MW/640MWh of capacity, with the potential to expand to 1.3GWh – more than ten times the size of the largest battery currently in operation in the UK and set to be one of the world’s largest.
- The battery will provide fast-reacting power and system balancing with an initial two-hour duration, and is a significant piece of infrastructure on the UK’s journey to net zero.
As Cilla might have said. “What a lorra lorra lot of lithium!”
But it’s not just lithium-ion batteries that are getting large.
In The Power Of Solar With A Large Battery, I talked about a Highview Power CRYOBattery with a capacity of 50MW/500MWh, that is being built in the Atacama desert in Chile.
The Essex battery is a giant battery and it’s bigger than the one in Chile, but I’m fairly sure Highview Power could build a battery bigger than the one InterGen are building. You just add more liquid air tanks and turbomachinery.
The Anonymous Widower 
[…] in the UK, is Intergen’s 320 MW/640 MWh battery at Thames Gateway, that I wrote about in Giant Batteries Will Provide Surge Of Electricity Storage. It’s smaller than any of the four pumped storage schemes and they are probably less likely […]
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