Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) owner-operator Zenobē has achieved financial close for its 200MW/800Mh Coalburn project in South Lanarkshire, Scotland.
The four-hour Coalburn BESS was approved last April. The financing comes from a group of international lenders, including Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW), ABN Amro, Mizuho and Siemens Financial Services. All financiers were also participants Zenobē’s 400MW battery project in Eccles.
Canadian Solar’s e-STORAGE energy storage unit will supply the battery systems and Omexom will balance the plant operations. Zenobē signed one 15-year toll agreement with Drax for the project at the beginning of the year.
The Coalburn BESS is the first four-hour UK transmission scale BESS to reach financial close, Zenobē said. A A four-hour grid-scale site is live in Irelandcommissioned by Statkraft in February. Developer Aura Power has a 100MW/400MWh four-hour project in development in Capenhurst, Cheshire.
When planning was set for the Coalburn project, it said it had a protected grid connection offer for 2026. However, the connection queue realignment resulted in significant delays in connection timelines, despite eventually freeing up capacity to connect.
Only BESS projects that have been granted ‘protected’ connections will be connected to the UK electricity grid before 2035. Coalburn is now due to be connected in 2028 and was the recipient of the first formal connection offer issued by the National Energy System Operator (NESO).
According to Zenobē, the longer battery life reflects the increasing demand for flexibility at the transmission level to support a net-zero network.
Zenobē founder and director James Basden said: “Despite significant regulatory changes, the Coalburn project demonstrates Zenobē’s continued commitment to enabling the delivery of the government’s Clean Power 2030 ambition.”
That was likely a reference to grid connection reform and an ongoing legal battle over long-term energy storage (LDES). The British government launched her LDES hood and floor support scheme in April, aimed at enabling investments in LDES projects, defined in the schedule as a duration of 8 hours or morethat do not support current market revenues and opportunities.
Zenobē was one of several BESS owner-operators who signed an open letter stating that the plan targets short-term BESS, which will reduce its buildout, jeopardize government deployment targets and cost consumers billions.
“No one has really thought about the problem we’re trying to solve. No one has really thought about the duration, the power, and how we could fill that time gap without LDES,” Basden says. told our sister site Energy storage.news in April.
In the press release announcing the financing for Coalburn, Zenobē specifically stipulates that the BESS will operate at a maximum import/export of 200 MW for four hours of storage, but can also operate at a number of different power and duration outputs: 100 MW for up to eight hours, or 50 MW for up to 16 hours.
This applies to every BESS resource; even a 1 MWh system can sustain itself for 100 hours by discharging only at 10 kW.
