Five ‘long duration storage’ projects have been jointly awarded over £4 million of funding by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
The funding is intended to accelerate commercialisation such storage projects through to actual demonstrations. BEIS says, “the projects will be expected to mobilise their proposed technologies to prepare for potential deployment on the UK energy system”.
Four projects won funding in the ‘electrical energy storage’ category. The largest was the Cheshire Energy Storage Centre, led by io consulting. It will receive £1 million to enable its consortium to develop an electricity storage facility which could Hydrostor’s Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage technology and deploy it at mothballed EDF gas cavities in Cheshire
Gravitricity will receive £912,410.84 to design its multiweight energy store demonstrator project, which will store and discharge energy by lifting and lowering multiple weights in a vertical underground shaft.
In Aberdeen, Subsea 7 and FLASC B.V. will receive £471,760.00 to further develop the ‘Long Duration Offshore Storage Bundle’, which will store energy as a combination of pressurised seawater and compressed air, using a hydro-pneumatic technology.
In Bathgate, Scotland, Invinity Energy Systems will receive £708,371 to demonstrate how a 40MWh Vanadium Flow Battery could deliver long duration storage-enabled power on demand from UK-based solar generation.
One so-called ‘Power-to-X’ energy storage technology won funding. That was led by B9 Energy Storage, which will receive £986,082 for a 20MW membrane-free-electrolyser green hydrogen project at Ballylumford, Northern Ireland. Using otherwise curtailed wind power, the hydrogen produced will be stored in local underground salt caverns for later use as a fuel in transport and electricity sectors. The aim is to create a full-cycle hydrogen economy (production, storage, distribution and usage) on site.
No projects were awarded funding in the ‘thermal energy storage’ technology category.