Highview Power, a developer of long-duration energy storage solutions, announced June 18 that it had been awarded a £10 million grant from the UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) for a 50 MW cryogenic energy storage facility with a planned minimum of 250 MWh, its CRYOBattery™, to help the country achieve its decarbonization goals. Highview Power was the only electricity energy storage technology company recipient of the Storage at Scale Competition hosted by the UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.
Highview Power has entered into a joint venture with Carlton Power, a UK independent power station developer, to build and operate the facility at Trafford Energy Park, just outside of Manchester. The facility, located in Carrington Village, is planned to be one of Europe’s largest battery storage systems. In addition, it will provide grid services to help integrate renewable energy, stabilize the regional electrical grid, and ensure future energy security during blackouts and other disruptions. Highview Power and Carlton Power plan to co-develop up to four additional CRYOBattery projects in the UK, totalling over 1 GWh.
Highview Power recently received a £35 million investment from Sumitomo Heavy Industries, part of which will be utilized for the development of this project.
Construction of the CRYOBattery facility at Trafford Park is expected to start later this year and enter commercial operation in 2022. It will use existing substation and transmission infrastructure, with its income derived from several markets, including arbitrage, grid balancing, and ancillary services such as frequency response and voltage support.
Highview Power says its cryogenic energy storage systems, which use liquid air as the storage medium, are the only long-duration energy storage solution available today that are locatable and can offer multiple gigawatt-hours of storage – weeks’ worth of storage, not just hours or days. The company says that at the scale of gigawatt-hours, CRYOBatteries paired with renewables are equivalent in performance to – and could replace – thermal and nuclear baseload power in addition to supporting electricity transmission and distribution systems while providing additional security of supply. Supply from a 10-hour, 200 MW / 2 GWh system is expected to cost about £110/MWh.