Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) has agreed to divest a minority stake in its 500MW/1,000MWh Devilla BESS in Scotland to the Scottish National Investment Bank and the Nuclear Liabilities Fund.
On behalf of its CI IV fund, CIP has sold a minority stake in the 2-hour battery energy storage system (BESS) project to the two state-owned companies. The Denmark-based investor will retain a majority stake in the project, which is expected to enter service in 2028.
The Scottish National Investment Bank is the country’s development bank with a net-zero investment mandate. The Nuclear Liabilities Fund has since been established to cover the costs of decommissioning eight nuclear power stations (formerly British Energy, now owned by EDF). It invests in assets to generate returns and help finance these costs.
Devilla is commercialized through a ten-year optimization agreement with utility company SSE and a fifteen-year capacity market contract (CM).
It is one of three transmission-connected BESS assets co-developed by Alcemi and CIP where the company is building all 500 MW/1GWh systems in addition to the Coalburn 1 and Coalburn 2 projects.
It made one final investment decision (FID) for Coalburn 1 in December 2023 and then did the same thing Coalburn 2 and Devilla in January 2025. The Coalburn projects will come online in 2026/2027.
The divestment reflects the step it is taking with the Coalburn 1 project, in which it sold a 50% stake to investor AXI IM Alts April 2025.
All three are strategically located to reduce wind curtailment by the National Energy System Operator (NESO), which cannot be transported southwards to UK demand centres. business leaders explained on our sister site Energy storage.news in an interview in January last year (subscription required).
The BESS will enable NESO to store that wind energy for later use, via the Balancing Mechanism (BM), currently the only location-based revenue source for BESS in Britain.
CIP too acquired the onshore renewable energy and storage portfolio of Danish IPP Ørsted in February this year, comprising 825MW of solar, wind and BESS. The company is also active in BESS in North America, South America and Australia.
