The Anonymous Widower

SMS Brings Online 90MW Of Energy Storage In Yorkshire And Suffolk

The title of this post, is the same as that of this insight from SMS plc.

This is the sub-heading.

A 50MW site near Ipswich and a 40MW system in Barnsley are now fully operational, delivering added resilience, flexibility, and security to the UK power grid
SMS has also secured planning for a further 200MW of energy storage sites, increasing its pipeline of projects to 760MW to be delivered over the next five years

These are the first two paragraphs.

Smart energy infrastructure group, SMS plc, has begun operating two new grid-scale Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) that add a combined 90MW of storage capacity to the UK’s electricity transmission network.

A 50 megawatt (MW) project located at Brook Farm, near Ipswich, and a 40MW site in Stairfoot, Barnsley, are now fully operational, delivering essential grid balancing and flexibility services at a time of year when the power network has come under increased strain due to cold weather, gas shortages, and heightened winter demand. The large lithium-ion batteries installed across both sites hold enough capacity to store electricity for approximately 40,000 UK homes.

This paragraph describes the company’s portfolio.

The latest battery projects to be connected to the grid in Suffolk and South Yorkshire are the second and third sites that SMS has developed following the completion of its inaugural 50MW BESS in Cambridgeshire last year. Whilst these newly commissioned sites take SMS’s total operational capacity to 140MW across three live projects, the company has also announced fully secured consent for an additional 200MW of projects in England. This takes the group’s total BESS pipeline to 760MW, including 150MW that are already under construction and expected to be completed in 2023.

There seems to be several of these smaller BESS companies coming through. This must be a good thing, as we need more storage.

Also if companies are building these batteries, they must be getting a return on their money, so we’ll see more built.

 

January 7, 2024 - Posted by | Energy, Energy Storage | , , , , ,

1 Comment »

  1. BESS companies thought they would make money in the ESO ancillary services market (managing frequency now we dont have enough big 500MW coal sets load following anymore and wind much more variable) but since ESO moved that onto an auction platform prices have been driven down very low as too many are competing now. Its also very seasonal and skewed to summer months when renewable penetration is much higher so frequency control needs much more intervention. They are trying to trade the wholesale market but as ive said before these should all be built near solar or windfarm grid nodes so they can be charged “on the cheap” when there are transmission constraints. Too many though are built on cheap agricultural/rural land and end up being at risk of not being able to import when energy prices are low.
    So yes this is good but we need it to be properly planned and coordinated by a CEGB MkII so the aggregate of all the efforts gives the best outcome. Still allows for private sector ownership but they would bid like the offshore windfarms do for seabed rights.

    This gives us about 3GWh of BESS now but to put it in context we used 745Gwh yesterday!!

    Comment by nickrl | January 7, 2024 | Reply


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