Europe’s largest battery project gets approval in the UK

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has granted planning approval to the deployment of what will be Europe's largest storage project when completed – a 320 MW/640 MWh storage complex under development by U.K. energy company InterGen.

The £200 million ($266 million) project is planned to be deployed at the DP World London Gateway, which is a logistics park located on the banks of the Thames in Essex. The storage system, which the company said could be expanded to 1.3 GWh, is expected to provide fast-reacting power and system balancing with an initial two-hour duration. “When fully charged, the battery could power up to 300,000 homes for two hours,” the company said. “However, it will mostly be used to support and stabilize existing electricity supplies.”

The huge facility is expected to come online in 2024, with construction being scheduled to start in 2022. No more technical or financial details on the project were provided. It stated, however, that a second large battery project with a capacity of 175 MW/350 MWh is being planned near Spalding, in Lincolnshire, and that approval is still pending.

InterGen currently operates around 4 GW of power generation assets across the U.K. and Australia. These include, among others, an 800 MW flexible, natural gas-fired combined cycle power plant near London and another, 810 MW facility of the same kind near Liverpool.

*The article was amended on November 30 to reflect that the project is not world's largest storage facility under development, as we previously reported. The world's largest project is a 1,500 MW/6,000 MWh storage facility under development in the United States.