A new 50MW battery storage site in the UK will be another example of how batteries are benefiting the grid and offering returns for investors, the company behind the project has said. 

Battery storage is flexible, remarkable — and investable — but you need to know what you’re doing and know where the market opportunities and limits lie. Renewable and clean energy financier Laurent Segalen from Megawatt-X explains some of the things he’s seen as batteries have become an infrastructure asset in their own right.

Macquarie’s Green Investment Group (GIG) has acquired a portfolio of 187MWh of late-stage development battery storage projects in the UK.

With a project pipeline in excess of 14GW, a developing regulatory envelope and maturing revenue streams, the UK’s energy storage sector continues to be at the forefront globally. Molly Lempriere charts the market’s development to date and uncovers how it has responded to deployment barriers.

Foresight Solar Fund, a UK-based investment company with over a gigawatt of solar PV assets in its portfolio, has made its first move into the battery storage space.

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 battery storage market in the UK has become a viable investment opportunity in just the past few months, even without the backing of long-term contracts for grid services, according to an investment manager in the renewable energy sector.

Energy market mechanisms must evolve in order to support long-duration energy storage, with the existing frameworks having “significant problems” incentivising those technologies, a panel of experts has concluded.

Battery storage was called into action in Britain after a newly-inaugurated interconnector with France tripped.

National Grid ESO, the electricity system operator tasked with keeping the lights on in the UK, is looking to enable multiple application stacking for providers of a new frequency response service that also participate in the national Balancing Mechanism.