The £300 million funding round was led by the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB) and multinational energy leviathan Centrica, supported by investors including Rio Tinto, Goldman Sachs, KIRKBI and Mosaic Capital.

The investment will enable the construction of one of the world’s largest long duration energy storage (LDES) facilities in Carrington, Manchester, using Highview’s proprietary LAES technology.

Once complete, Carrington – otherwise known as the location for Manchester United’s training complex – will have a capacity of 300MWh and an output power of 50MW per hour for six hours.

Construction begins on the site now.  Full operation is scheduled for early 2026. Over 700 jobs will be supported during construction and in the plant’s supply chain.

UKIB’s investment reflects its ambition to direct private finance to help new technologies reach commercial scale, as they aid Britain’s transition to Net Zero.

With its £70 million investment, Centrica comes on board as Highview Power’s strategic partner, supporting both Carrington & an accelerated roll-out of the firm’s technology elsewhere in the UK.

Highview believes its programme sets the bar for storage energy systems around the world, raising Britain to global leadership in energy storage and managing grid flexibility.

Highview Power is now at work planning four even bigger LAES plants elsewhere in Britain. The 2.5 GWh facilities, funded with an anticipated future £3 billion, will ensure a fast roll-out of the technology to align with the nation’s LDES (long duration energy storage) goals enabling the ESO’s Future Energy Scenario plans.

Highview Power has developed its LAES technology over 17 years. The technology can store renewable electricity for as much as several weeks, longer than electro-chemical batteries. The company says it is ready to be rolled out at scale, at key grid chokepoints.

Stability services to the National Grid including system balancing, feature among Highview’s business offers, speeding the redundancy of despatchable fossil fuelled power to manage demand volatility.

More manageable storage curbs curtailment costs, too. Last year British bill payers were caught on a £800 million hook, as stilled wind farms claimed compensation simply because the NG was too full to accept their low carbon output.

Highview Power seeks completion by 2035 of its larger UK installations, timed to meet one National Grid scenario of 2GW needed from LAES. That figure would represent nearly 20% of Britain’s energy storage for longer than two hours.

“There is no energy transition without storage” declared Richard Butland, pictured, Highview’s co-founder & CEO.

 “The UK’s investment in world-leading offshore wind & renewables requires a national long-duration storage programme to capture excess wind and support the grid’s transformation.

“UKIB, Centrica and our other partners are backing Highview’s ambitions to bring renewable energy storage into Britain’s economy at scale, liberating the potential of what is both the greenest and by far our cheapest energy source.

Centrica group chief executive Chris O’Shea enthused: “The energy transition is an opportunity that could transform lives. But with the UK’s changing energy mix, and more intermittency from renewables, we have to explore new, innovative ways to store energy so our customers have electricity available when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine”.

Greater Manchester’s mayor Andy Burnham weighed in too. “My vision is for Greater Manchester to be a leader in the green transition. Highview Power’s decision to build one of the world’s largest long duration energy storage facilities at Carrington is a huge boost for the region.

“This new plant will deliver renewable energy to homes and business across our region and bring world-leading technology, jobs, skills and investment to Greater Manchester. I’m delighted to welcome Highview Power”, Burnham declared.

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The science and technology committee’s enquiry into mass adoption of high volume, long duration electricity storage beyond the two hour mark, accuses ministers of dithering, and sending confusing signals to investors, system operators, developers and distributors.

Storage as an enabler of carbon-free power needs urgent support in order to scale up in time to meet Net Zero, says the committee.  But currently its backers confronts a policy void in Whitehall.

Storage technologies for power reserves lasting potentially months include chemical-, terrain, marine- and gravity-based methods. In general terms the committee favours hydrogen as the most widely applicable, due to its low cost of production and ubiquity.

Under the blunt title ‘Get on with it’, their Lordships’ report lists key recommendations, including

• Speeding up decisions needed for D-ESNZ’s anticipated energy system plan. These include choices needed on hydrogen, seen as a front-runner technology by the committee, as a mainstay of supra-two hour storage mechanisms.

“The UK cannot wait for decisions in 2025 and 2026 to invest in storage if the commitment to a secure decarbonised electricity system by 2035 is to be realised”, the committee warns.

• Commit to a strategic power reserve. Ministers should accept the National Infrastructure Commission’s goal of 25 TWh of electricity a year by 2040, says the committee.

“We are concerned that the Government seems to have only just begun thinking about whether it needs a strategic reserve and has no clear plan for supply shocks”, the report admonishes.

• State a minimum national target for energy storage. The government should assess and acknowledge the likely minimum scale of storage across different durations needed to balance the energy system”, the committee urges. “This will set the scale of ambition that policies to support storage must meet.

Interest from private investors has been strong in recent years; McKinsey is among consultants maintaining a working group composed of multinational corporations. In 2021 it recommended that global long-term storage capacity should reach between 1.5 and 2.5 GWh by 2040.

Commenting on the report – available here –  consultant Jack Green-Morgan from Dods Political Intelligence said,

“The Lord committee adds fuel to the argument that the UK needs to rapidly invest in new technologies to improve domestic energy security and reduce emissions from the power sector”.

“Investing in long-term energy storage has the potential to make more efficient use of cheap renewable energy by storing energy when output is higher than demand, and releasing it when demand exceeds output.

“Published just one day after the Energy Secretary announced the government would support the construction of new unabated gas power plants”, Green-Morgan added, “the committee will feel vindicated in their assessment that the failure to invest in flexible energy storage has increased the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels and vulnerability to external shocks”.

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Extending volumes of power hosting for periods beyond two hours is seen as critical to extracting carbon from grids, and balancing a system increasingly reliant on intermittent generation from renewable sources.

Central to Whitehall’s latest thinking is developing a cap and floor price mechanism, analogous to the contracts for difference model successfully deployed in spurring investment to advance wind, solar and hydro electricity.

Deploying up to 20 gigawatts (GW) of long duration electricity storage will result, the document calculates, in system savings of up to £24bn, representing a saving to consumers of 3.3% of the total system costs.

Aimed at investors, power suppliers, storage project developers and technologists, consumer groups and network operators, the views-gathering exercise runs until 5 March.

The department’s call for evidence in July 2021 identified barriers to long duration storage including lack of certainty about revenues, high upfront capital costs and long build times.

Whitehall’s outline thinking offers suggestions for eligibility criteria to regulate participants in storage markets, as well as scenarios developed by D-ESNZ officials for their growth.

Industry and commercial interests have been increasingly pondering the steps needed in financial and technical engineering to bring forward grid-scale long-term power endurance in serious volumes. Consultancy McKinseys initiated its international research group in 2021.

Last winter, consultants Stonehaven advising ‘liquid air’ technologists Highview Power calculated that Britain had wasted as much as £ 60 billion over four winter months alone, through lack of long-term power storage.

Renewables and clean tech trades body the REA two years ago published its own thinking on long-duration power hosting and despatch.

Its head of policy Frank Gordon gave the ministry’s two-month consulation a warm welcome.

“The REA welcomes the publication of proposals to reward the considerable system benefits from longer duration energy storage systems with a new support mechanism. We need much more of this valuable resource, alongside all forms and durations of energy storage, to make the transition to a Net Zero energy system as smooth and cost effective as possible.

”We look forward to discussing the details with Government and our members and working together on implementation as soon as possible.”

Read the government consultation document here.

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