Centrica and the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB) have backed Highview Power with a £300 million investment. The financing will allow the liquid air energy storage company to begin construction on its first large-scale project.
Construction of the 50MW/300MWh long-term energy storage project (LDES) will start immediately and begin commercial operation in early 2026, the company said. The project, which will utilize Highview Power’s proprietary Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) technology, will take place in Carrington, Manchester.
The funding round was led by state-owned UKIB and utility Centrica, with participation from mining company Rio Tinto, bank Goldman Sachs, private equity firm Mozaïek Capital and KIRKBI, the family office of the Lego-founding Kristiansen family.
UKIB mobilizes private finance to help unique technologies, including those for the energy transition, reach commercial scale while boosting local economic growth. In 2023, UKIB and Centrica announced plans to work together to invest up to £265 million in energy storage development.
Centrica has joined Highview Power as a strategic partner, contributing £70 million of the total £300 million. Highview will also begin planning the next four large-scale facilities totaling 2.5 GWh, which will require £3 billion of investment, in line with UK support mechanisms and the forecast required deployment of LDES.
Britain already has more than 4GW/4GWh of short-duration, 1-hour and 2-hour online lithium-ion BESS projects, mainly providing ancillary services and some grid balancing and energy trading activities. Many in the industry suggest that as renewable energy generation grows, gigawatt hours of capacity will need to grow well beyond what is financially cost-effective with lithium-ion BESS alone.
Highview Power aims to accelerate the rollout of its larger facilities in the UK by 2035, in line with one of National Grid’s target scenario forecasts of a 2GW requirement from LAES, which would represent almost 20% of the UK’s energy storage needs would represent in the long term. .
Richard Butland, co-founder and CEO of Highview Power, said: “There is no energy transition without storage. The UK’s investment in leading offshore wind and renewables requires a national long-term energy storage program to capture excess wind and support the transformation of the electricity grid.
“UKIB and Centrica and our partners have today backed our ambitious plan to bring renewable energy storage to the UK economy at scale, unleashing the potential of what is both the greenest and by far the cheapest source of energy for the UK economy and energy security is provided. ”
This article was originally published on Energy storage.news.
