Centrica and the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB) have backed Highview Power with a £300 million investment. The funding will enable the liquid air energy storage firm to start building its first large-scale project.
Construction on the 50MW/300MWh long-duration energy storage (LDES) project will start immediately and begin commercial operation in early 2026, the company said. The project, which will use Highview Power’s proprietary liquid air energy storage (LAES) technology, is set to be in Carrington, Manchester.
The funding round was led by the state-owned UKIB and utility Centrica, with participation from mining firm Rio Tinto, bank Goldman Sachs, private equity firm Mosaic Capital and KIRKBI, the family office of the Lego-founding Kristiansen family.
UKIB mobilises private finance to help first-of-a-kind technologies, including those for the energy transition, reach commercial scale while driving local economic growth. In 2023, UKIB and Centrica announced plans to partner to invest up to £265 million in energy storage development.
Centrica has joined Highview Power as its strategic partner and contributed £70 million of the total £300 million. Highview will also start planning its next four larger-scale facilities totalling 2.5GWh, which will require £3 billion of investment in line with the UK’s support mechanisms and forecasted required deployments of LDES.
The UK already has over 4GW/4GWh of short-duration, 1-hour and 2-hour lithium-ion BESS projects online, which primarily provide ancillary services and some grid balancing and energy trading activities. Many in the industry suggest that as renewable generation grows, the gigawatt hours of capacity will need to grow far beyond what is financially cost-effective with just lithium-ion BESS.
Highview Power aims to accelerate the roll-out of its larger facilities across the UK by 2035 in line with one of National Grid’s target scenario forecasts of a 2 GW requirement from LAES, which would represent nearly 20% of the UK’s long duration energy storage needs.
Richard Butland, co-founder and CEO of Highview Power, said, “There is no energy transition without storage. The UK’s investment in world-leading offshore wind and renewables requires a national long-duration energy storage programme to capture excess wind and support the grid’s transformation.
“UKIB and Centrica and our partners have today backed our ambitious plan to bring renewable energy storage into the UK economy at scale, liberating the potential of what is both the greenest and by far the cheapest energy source for the UK economy and provide energy security.”
This article was originally published on Energy-storage.news.
