Maximising revenue through flexibility: colocation of wind and storage

By Molly Lempriere
LinkedIn
Twitter
Reddit
Facebook
Email
Image: ScottishPower.

There are numerous benefits from collocating battery energy storage with wind power, including grid availability and planning ease.

Speaking at Solar Media’s Energy Storage Summit 2021, Tony Gannon, head of project management at ScottishPower Renewables explained how the company had chosen to take advantage of a number of these efficiencies for its 539MW Whitelee Wind Farm.

This article requires Premium SubscriptionBasic (FREE) Subscription

Enjoy 12 months of exclusive analysis

  • Regular insight and analysis of the industry’s biggest developments
  • In-depth interviews with the industry’s leading figures
  • Annual digital subscription to the PV Tech Power journal
  • Discounts on Solar Media’s portfolio of events, in-person and virtual

Or continue reading this article for free

Whitelee is a 50MW/50MWh storage project, which is collocating liquid cooled lithium-ion batteries with the UK’s largest onshore windfarm near Glasgow, Scotland. Plans for the battery were approved by the Scottish government in June 2019, and inverter maker Ingeteam was announced as the power electronics technology provider in July 2020, while the batteries used are lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry cells from Chinese manufacturer CATL.

The £21 million (US$29.35 million) project will take advantage of the grid connection already at the site, and help optimise output from the windfarm. Gannon pointed to the complex control systems needed to ensure both assets performed as efficiently as possible.

“We want our assets to be as flexible as possible, to enter as many systems as possible,” he continued, pointing to the wide range of economic pathways the battery can play into, such as the Capacity Market and Balancing Mechanism.  

This range of revenue streams means ScottishPower Renewables can benefit from incremental changes within a stack, rather than chasing a “golden goose” said Gannon.

Going forwards, as renewables penetration continues to grow, there will also be an increasing opportunity for sites with co-location to avoid curtailment. This has already begun to be a problem in the UK, with wind assets switched off during periods of low demand and strong winds.

Battery storage can help maximise a sites revenue and green energy capacity more broadly, by ensuring that power is stored instead of lost, and utilised when demand increases.

While still early days for this type of usage, it’s “something we have our eye on” said Gannon. Standalone batteries can help to manage overcapacity constraints as well, but collocated assets are often better placed, as by their nature they are close to the generation itself.

This can turn what can be seen as a limitation of co-located storage and wind – that it must be build where the generation is, as opposed to where there is the biggest benefit to the grid of storage – into an advantage.

While stand-alone battery assets undoubtedly offer benefits – and ScottishPower Renewables itself is developing a site in Ireland as part of DS3 – they  are not a priority for ScottishPower Renewables currently Gannon said, as the company is a “generator at heart”.

ScottishPower unveiled a new hybrid power strategy for the UK and Ireland in 2019, with a major focus on combining solar and battery storage with wind on both existing and new sites.

1 July 2025
Leonardo Royal Hotel London Tower Bridge, London, UK
11 November 2025
San Diego, USA
The 2024 Summit included innovative new features including a ‘Crash Course in Battery Asset Management’, Ask-Me-Anything formats and debate-style sessions. You can expect to meet and network with all the key industry players again in 2025 from major US asset owners, operators, RTOs and ISOs, optimizers, software and analytics providers, technical consultancies, O&M technology providers and more.

Read Next

April 17, 2025
Clean energy trade body American Clean Power Association (ACP) has released a report on energy storage market reforms for regional grid operators based on findings from the Brattle Group.
April 17, 2025
Battery storage developer and operator Spearmint Energy has secured US$250 million for two battery energy storage system (BESS) projects located in Texas, US, totalling 400MWh.
April 17, 2025
US non-lithium battery technology companies Eos Energy Enterprises and Unigrid have announced partnerships to deploy their tech abroad, striking deals in the UK and India respectively.
Premium
April 17, 2025
Owner-operator BW ESS’ 100MW/331MWh UK Bramley BESS was unique in numerous ways when it came online last year, the first outside China to use Sungrow’s AC block technology.
April 17, 2025
A proposed landowner-led 576MWh solar-plus-storage site in Tasmania has been added to Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

Most Popular

Email Newsletter