The closure of UK battery storage specialist EPC and independent connection provider (ICP) firm G2 Energy has been confirmed by Companies House, with a senior manager describing “unsympathetic clients” in comments given to Energy-Storage.news and that the bulk of the team is joining outsourcing giant Mitie.
Reports on LinkedIn of G2 Energy’s ‘closure’ and ‘liquidation’ began to appear in early July, with numerous employees and recruiters lamenting the cease of trading of the grid connection specialist, which is headquartered in Buckinghamshire.
That now appears to have been confirmed by G2 Energy Limited’s profile on the UK government’s official company registry Companies House. An ‘Extraordinary resolution to wind up’ was filed on 7 July which followed a ‘Creditors voluntary liquidation – Commencement of winding up’ case starting four days earlier (3 July).
CEO Kelvin Ruck, COO Nigel Hughes and 45 other ex-G2 colleagues are now joining outsourcing and energy service group Mitie to head up a new unit focusing on the the battery energy storage system (BESS) sector, Energy-Storage.news can reveal.
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G2 Energy has not announced anything publicly but a senior source from its management team told Energy-Storage.news:
“One of the main issues was the unsympathetic clients/employers who used the contracts to drive G2 into this position rather than working with us – they were warned of our position but decided to just apply the contract conditions with very unreasonable payless notices, exacerbating the cashflow constraint that they caused,” they said.
“These clients now have their own problems with projects being delayed while they find alternative resources in a very constrained environment at a cost premium, rather than working with us during a very challenging trading period. The advice would be to ‘look after your contractors, before you lose them all’.”
The company is an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm and independent connection provider (ICP) which has worked on major BESS projects in the UK in the past few years. ICPs are licensed to design new connections to the network, dig and fill trenches on and around the property to be connected, and install electrical switches and transformers.
By 2018 when the market was just picking up, G2 Energy had already worked on over 100MW of battery projects, as reported by Energy-Storage.news at the time.
Since then, it has provided its services for, amongst others, the 196MWh Pillswood project (Europe’s largest), a soon-to-be part community-owned 30MWh project in Bristol, while in December it secured the EPC agreement for a 102MWh project with Econergy Renewable Energy and Trina Storage, in South Yorkshire.
Other independent EPCs and ICPs have reportedly faced issues in the past few months too, and there has been much discussion on LinkedIn in comments on various posts about the closure of G2.
“Too many companies struggling in the energy game… only winners are the DNO’s (distribution network operators) …. Contractors never win but always give it their all…. Some DNO’s need to stop battering contractors and actually work with them,” said one user, a construction manager at a separate EPC firm.
Another, an infrastructure-focused recruiter, lamented “schemes being developed by large venture capital investors of whom commercially appear to want the project built, but place all the risk with everyone else,” in a post they referred back to which actually predated the G2 Energy reports.
The UK market reached over 3GW/3.4GWh of operational grid-scale BESS at the end of H1 2023, according to figures from Solar Media Market Research’s UK Battery Storage Project Database Report.
