Central Bedfordshire’s planning committee has granted approval for a 500MW battery energy storage system (BESS) proposed by Statera Energy.
The developer’s Sundon Storage project will have an 8-hour duration and as such is one of 77 projects currently being considered for the Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) cap-and-floor support program.
A duration of 8 hours would provide an energy storage capacity of 4,000 MWh.
Whether lithium-ion assets, the technology used in Sundon Storage, would be included in the LDES support scheme was a subject of some debate before it became clear that projects would not be excluded “based solely on their technology type”.
In the first window of the support scheme more than 70% of the awarded projects, in terms of gigawatt capacity, were lithium-ion BESS.
Oliver Troup, development leader at Statera, said the duration of the BESS makes it “particularly exciting”.
In addition to providing network security, Statera says the site will improve the local environment, delivering a ‘significant’ net gain in biodiversity by creating new habitats and supporting the local ecology.
The company said construction of Sundon Storage is expected to begin “later this decade” and be fully operational by 2030. The company did not say whether the Sundon project has a grid connection offer. Although less oversubscribed than energy storage, LDES projects will operate at full capacity until 2035with offers based in part on when applications were submitted – the earlier applications were prioritized and 5.6 GW was not prioritised.
Should the 500MW, 8-hour BESS go ahead as planned, it would be one of the largest such projects in Britain. Statera currently owns and operates the UK’s largest BESS, a 300MW/600MWh project in Essexwhich came online in August 2025.
Other energy storage in the area
Statera’s LDES project will connect to the Sundon National Grid substation, where it is also located EDF’s 50MW/100MWh BESS connects. That project came online in 2024.
It was connected to a supergrid transformer installed in a 33 kV substation on the site of the existing 400 kV Sundon substation, which National Grid had installed as part of its ‘grid park’ initiative, started in 2022.
The initiative created the opportunity for three grid-scale BESSs to connect at the same point, each through a different customer. In addition to the EDF project, a 49.5 MW BESS developed by Clearstone Energy and acquired by Foresight Energy in 2023 connects to the grid park.
