UK Group Plans First Large-Scale Liquid Air Energy Storage Plant
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the FT.
This is the first paragraph.
Highview Power is attempting to raise £400mn to fund project with capacity to supply 600,000 homes.
Note.
- This battery will have an output of 30 MW and a storage capacity of 300 MWh.
- The battery will be built at Carrington, near Manchester.
- Highview Power hope it will be opened by the end of 2024.
- It appears that the £400 million will also be used to start the engineering for another four batteries.
The article gives a detailed history of the company.
The Anonymous Widower 
Hm, they’ve been talking about this for some time now. According to their website, the Carrington plant is ‘underway’, but now they’re saying they haven’t even got the finance yet?
Comment by Peter Robins | November 15, 2022 |
I have heard very good reports of Rupert Pearce from a couple of trusted sources.
Judging by the amateurish web site, I suspect he found a rather chaotic company and only now has he started to get the act together. Carlton certainly seem to be a professional bunch.
Comment by AnonW | November 15, 2022 |
disappointing though. Last year they were saying it would be operational this year – and now in 2 years time. Perhaps it would be better if they were taken over by one of the large oil/gas/chemical companies, who would have the finance, engineering and management skills to develop the tech at a large scale.
Comment by Peter Robins | November 15, 2022
You don’t get any bigger than Sumitomo and they must own a noticeable share.
Comment by AnonW | November 15, 2022
Whatever happened to the projects Highview were promoting only a couple of months ago that ….”will be built at a breakneck speed of two to three a year during the 2020s, with a target of 20 sites able to provide almost 6GW of back-up electricity”.
Pearce has had his new management team in place since July/August so they’ve no excuses to still be putting out such a confusing rhetoric.
Remember that Pearce was selected “on the rebound” following the withdrawal of the headhunted new CEO who was selected to start at the beginning of this year having flirted with Columbia Capital a venture capital fund.
I’m beginning to wonder whether Pearce is in reality more focussed on other things .
Comment by fammorris | November 15, 2022 |
However, I have no worries about the technology, as many years ago, I modelled a complex chemical reaction on similar lines. Unfortunately, like my work with Balaena, it never saw the light of day. With Balaena the patents can be found in dead patent databases, but there is no evidence of the other.
Some of these projects have very strange gestations. Many ears ago, I did some data analysis for British Rail about cable breaks. Recently, the son of one of the engineers, I worked with, contacted me, as he was now working for Network Rail on a similar project.
Comment by AnonW | November 15, 2022 |
I agree with you that the LAES technology looks very promising and that good ideas sometimes spend many years ‘in the long grass’ before emerging. I wonder however if there are lessons that could be learnt about the successful promotion of nascent technology that would project its potential more effectively than the practice of feeding an indiscriminate media machine.
Comment by fammorris | November 16, 2022 |
There is a bit of a chicken/egg situation with all such new technologies. Project financiers like a proven track record, so they know what returns they can expect from their investment. This is now well established for wind and solar. But new tech can’t provide that until they’ve built some pilot plants to establish what costs/income are likely to be. So they need venture capital to set that up.
As the FT article notes, projects like LAES are expensive to build. I had thought that Highview already had the finance for the Carrington plant (in fact, that it was about to start operating), but it seems that’s not the case. I’ve been looking for the status on their progress in other countries, such as Spain, where they supposedly have an agreement with a leading energy company. But I couldn’t find anything recent, so I’m starting to wonder whether that’s hot air too.
Comment by Peter Robins | November 16, 2022 |