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Public Power Solutions (PPS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Swindon Borough Council, has received planning permission to build one of the UK’s largest battery storage facilities.
The standalone project, which will be located on the site of a former municipal depot, will have maximum output of up to 50MW and a storage capacity of up to 50MWh.
The facility will be used to help balance the power grid and facilitate the growth of intermittent renewable generation.
PPS said it will also help reduce the need for expensive grid reinforcements and will itself benefit from “very low” connection costs due to its proximity to the nearby substation at Toothill.
The company is now in discussions with developers to take on the funding and construction of the project.
Steve Cains, head of power solutions at PPS, said: “Local authorities are in a unique position to benefit from the growing demand for electricity storage, with diverse property portfolios and high energy consumption.
“We’re making it work at home here in Swindon, but this project could be replicated in many other parts of the country, helping generate an income for the cash-strapped public sector.”
Centrica is currently constructing a 49MW battery facility on the site of its former Roosecote gas-fired power station in Cumbria, and in February storage developer Arenko revealed it had selected GE to build a 41MW project in the Midlands as part of a new strategic alliance between the two companies.
Earlier in January, VLC Energy completed the installation the UK’s largest utility-scale battery portfolio to date, consisting of a 40MW battery facility in Kent and a 10MW facility in Cumbria. Drax is considering building a 200MW project at its giant coal and biomass plant in Yorkshire.
After the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy slashed the de-rating factor for most batteries in the capacity market, just 400MW of batteries won contracts in the most recent T-4 auction (de-rated capacity: 153MW) compared to around 500MW (de-rated capacity: 480MW) in the previous auction.
Aurora Energy Research has warned that the frequency response market is nearing saturation due to the large and growing pipeline of battery storage projects and said developers will need to start building business models around arbitrage – buying power when prices are low and then selling it when prices rise.
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