Cubico Sustainable Investments (Cubico) will begin construction of its first battery storage project in Britain after signing agreements with Tesla.
Global renewable energy investor Cubico said this morning that a battery supply agreement (BSA) and long-term service agreement (LTSA) have been signed with Tesla for the 47.5MW/95MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Dorset.
Cubico’s Mannington BESS is the investor’s first project in a 3.6 GW global pipeline to enter service. The company said the pipeline includes 1.3 GW of projects in advanced stages of development and 2.3 GW of greenfield projects still in the early stages of development.
The Mannington BESS will last two hours and will be connected to National Grid’s existing 400 kV substation, close to the project site. Construction will start early this year and be put into use in 2026.
To date, Cubico Sustainable Investments has commissioned solar, PV and renewable wind projects, as well as transmission infrastructure in global markets including North and South America, Southern Europe and the United Kingdom. Projects under construction include a 504 MW onshore wind power plant in Queensland, Australia.
In the field of BESS, Cubico formed a joint venture (JV) focused on the development of 1GW battery storage in Italy with developer and consultancy Storaltil in February 2024, as reported by our sister site Energy storage.news.
In Britain, it claims to have a combined pipeline of 2,400 MW of projects under development based on multiple technologies. In 2021, it set up a joint venture for UK solar and onshore wind energy with British property and infrastructure investor Peel NRE, aimed at developing 500 MW of generation capacity.
Cubico later took full ownership of the JV, Peel Cubico Renewables (PCR), in early 2024. A second phase of consultation was launched last November for one of the projects the JV is currently developing, the 130MW Frodsham Solar power station.
With a generation capacity of over 50 MW, Frodsham is classified as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP). Earlier this week, Solar energy portal published an in-depth article on the many gigawatts of planned large-scale solar PV and BESS NSIPs in the UK.
Meanwhile Tesla, the supplier-systems integrator of Mannington BESS, whose CEO Elon Musk said in a recent quarterly earnings call that its energy storage activities ‘growing like wildfire’ has just started trial production of battery storage technology in a new factory in ShanghaiChina. This is in addition to a dedicated factory for its grid-scale Megapack BESS solution in California.
Tesla was ranked as the only supplier with a AAA rating in the first edition of the Battery StorageTech Bankability Ratings Report from our colleagues at PV technology research. Analyst and author of the report Charlotte Gisbourne blogged about the findings of the first quarterly report in October before Energy storage.news.
