The developer announced yesterday (August 18) that his 300 MW/600MWH Thurrock Storage Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) project in Essex supplies energy to the grid.
Originally planned as a endurance project of 1 hour, the 2-hour BESS-ACTIVUM is part of Thurrock Flexible Generation, a complex that will also have a co-location of 450 MW flexible generation of gas-fired thermal power plant.
Project owner Statera has not revealed which applications the system will serve in his most recent release; The web page of the company for the project, however, quotes the capacity market, the wholesale markets, the frequency response and the balance mechanism as services and market opportunities that are usually played by batteries on a Nuts scale.
The company said that the site is strategically close to urban loading centers in London.
National Grid connected Thurrock storage with its Tilbury under station just south of the project site and noted that the transmission infrastructure used to be to connect the now retired Tilbury A and Tilbury B-coal-fired power stations with Tilbury B.
Tilbury A was demolished in 1999. Tilbury B, after he had contaminated the pollution instructions due to the high sulfur dioxide emissions, was briefly converted to run as a wood-fired biomassablant by the former owner Npower RWE before the closure in 2013.
National Grid said that there is work to connect the gas -fired generation of the site to the net.
Statera claimed that the combination of batteries and gas generation on one site enables the flexible generation of Thurrock to respond to fluctuations in supply and demand created by the addition of solar PV and wind for longer periods of shortage.
Statera specializes in flexible energy sources that can play a role in the low-carbon grid in addition to renewable energy sources, and claims to have more than 2.1 GW of projects in the UK that have already been supplied or in construction, plus another 16 GW in development or permission, consisting of batteries, pomphydro-energy storage.
The project was brought to financial closure last November because Statera £ 251 million extra secured with a syndicate of five banks. This raised the total financing of Statera for the flexible generation of Thurrock to £ 395 millionAfter an initial £ 144 million debt financing deal a year earlier.
The largest project of the UK: fact or fiction?
The statement of Statera that Thurrock Storage is the largest operational Bess facility of the UK sounds true. However, there are various projects in construction or development, which will probably take over the unofficial title soon.
These include a number from Statera itself. According to Solar Media market research analyst Josh Cornes, whose team the Battery storage: UK Pipeline & Completed Assets DatabaseWith Thurrock storage now online, three of the six largest battery storage projects on Grids scale in the UK were built by the developer.
Before Thurrock storage was the largest so far in the country-investor-investor Zenobe Energy’s Blackhillock 200 MW/400MWH scheduling Bess, between Inverness and Aberdeen in ScotlandAnnounced as operational in February, Cornes said.
In terms of other remarkable projects, Cornes said there are five 100 MW projects in the country. These include Statera’s Milksham West and Dollymans storage projects, the Capenhurst project of Zenobe, Lakeside Bess van Tagennergy and BW Group-Penso Power’s Bramley Bess. All are 100 MW, 2-hour endurance projects (200 MWh), except Bramley Bess, an assets for a longer duration from 330mWh to 100 MW.
Upcoming projects that are already under construction include three assets of 500 MW/1,000 MWh each, in development via a joint venture (JV) between Investor Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and Bess development platform Alcemi.
Cornes said that another Zenobe project, the 400 MW/800MWH Eccles Bess, and the 5-hour Welbar Energy Storage JV between Penso Power and Luminous in Hams Hall, Warwickshire, that is 350 MW/1,749MWH are currently also in construction.
Further looking ahead, four 1Gw or larger British projects with planning approval are waiting for construction, including the 1.4GW Thorpe Marsh project of Onpath Energy, approved in January 2025, Innovas 1,025 MW Almhome Energy Hub and others.
Cornes also confirmed that without other significant renewable or flexibility sources associated with the Tilbury substation, but with 800 MW of Zonne-PV Operational near the Essex site with 1.7 GW under construction or in the ready-made phase, the Claim of Statera also to choose true.
In the meantime, National Grid emphasized that the connection of Thurrock Storage with the grid is following a recent milestone in the VK Clean Energy, with the completion of the 373 MW Cleve Hill Solar PV factory in July.
