BW ESS and its partner Penso Power have signed the first long-term tolling agreement for a single battery energy storage system (BESS) asset in Great Britain with Shell Energy Europe.
The seven-year tolling agreement is for the 100MW/330MWh Bramley BESS currently under construction in Hampshire, in the south of England.
In 2021, global energy storage owner-operator BW ESS and Penso Power, which deploys, owns and manages grid-scale battery energy storage projects, announced a joint venture that will see BW ESS fund the build out of Penso’s UK project pipeline totalling over 3GWh.
The fixed price tolling agreement will provide revenue certainty for BW ESS and Penso Power while Shell trades the Bramley BESS into a range of ancillary services and wholesale markets. Shell will pay the owners a fixed fee for the BESS and keep all the upside.
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It may be the first tolling deal of this size for a single asset, but the first major UK tolling deal announced in the UK was by Gresham House and Octopus Energy for a 568MW portfolio of operational projects earlier this year. Gresham House New Energy assistant fund manager, James Bustin, recently spoke to Energy-Storage.news Premium about that deal, suggesting that it “woke up the wider market to the possibility” that tolls could be an option for their projects.
The 100MW/330MWh Bramley site is also the first project in Europe to deploy Sungrow’s PowerTitan 2.0 liquid cooled BESS – a system that combines a 2.5MW Power Conversion System using integrated string inverters and a 5MWh battery into a single container.
“This tolling agreement, which has been some time in the making, demonstrates the attractiveness of longer-duration, higher-performance battery systems,” BW ESS CEO Erik Strømsø said.
“It not only secures long-term revenues for Bramley, but also helps enable the market’s shift away from short-term frequency response towards load shifting.”
According to Rupen Tanna, head of power and systematic trading at Shell Energy Europe, because tolls are a feature of conventional energy trading, Shell has “the trading experience to add significant value, while supporting the UK’s ongoing energy transition”.
This story first appeared on Solar Power Portal.
