Gore Street Energy Storage Fund, a publicly listed energy storage investment funds in the UK, is entering its portfolio into the Dynamic Containment grid services market while it has 100MW of projects in Northern Ireland nearing completion.
The fund is aiming to have most of its operational portfolio of over 90MW participating in electricity network operator National Grid’s Dynamic Containment frequency regulation service from 1 April 2021, pointing to how the average price of £17 (US$23.70)/MW/h could provide the company with a “significant uplift in revenue”.
Dynamic Containment was soft-launched in October of last year and now has around 400MW of assets participating in it — but still remains undersubscribed, with about another 400MW of opportunities available. After the first seven weeks of operation, commentators pointed out that it is roughly twice as lucrative as other existing ancillary services in the UK, but owing to precise technical requirements, some potential providers are said to have been slow to capitalise.
Gore Street also pointed to how National Grid ESO permitted stacking of Dynamic Containment services with Balancing Mechanism participation in January 2021, enabling energy storage operators to optimise revenue strategy by unlocking additional value. It continued to state the Dynamic Containment service will further optimise “the increasingly important issue of balancing grid supply and demand”. The company’s 9MW Port of Tilbury project was recently entered into Dynamic Containment by optimiser Origami Energy.
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At the Energy Storage Summit 2021 hosted by our publisher Solar Media, many experts and industry stakeholders referred to how Dynamic Containment is the first step in a rollout of sophisticated grid-balancing services through National Grid ESO. The post-fault frequency correction service requires batteries to act to keep the grid’s at between +/- 0.2Hz to +/- 0.5 Hz of its 50Hz optimal operating frequency and is much faster than firm frequency response (FFR), which is among the suite of services it is aimed at replacing.
Gore Street expected to surpass 200MW of assets in Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland this year
Gore Street also said a few days ago that two 50MW battery projects it is building in Northern Ireland are nearing the final stages of construction and testing and are expected to start providing DS3 services — the island of Ireland’s own grid services programme — from the beginning of April as its assets across the Irish sea also enter Dynamic Containment.
Norwegian state-owned energy company Stakraft will provide market-access and optimisation services for Gore Street and its partner on the projects, developer Low Carbon. The battery sites, which are in Northern Ireland’s County Tyrone and County Armagh, will be used to provide rapid frequency response and reserves to the national electricity grid within milliseconds of a generation event, and trade in the wholesale integrated single electricity market, using Statkraft’s automated trading platform UNITY.
Gore Street Energy Storage Fund’s portfolio of assets in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is expected to surpass 200MW this year. The company has two 30MW projects in the Republic for which the company has made applications to expand to 90MW output each. System integrator Fluence has already been contracted to carry out the expansion of one, Porterstown, for which Gore Street has received approval.
This story originally appeared as a number of separate stories on our sister sites Current± and Solar Power Portal. Additional reporting for Energy-Storage.news by Andy Colthorpe.
