UK liquid air energy storage (LAES) start-up Highview Power said its first ever 250MWh ‘Cryobattery’ installation will be placed at the site of a decommissioned thermal power plant in the North of England and could be Europe’s largest ‘battery’ system when completed.
The company is a designer and manufacturer of liquid air energy storage (LAES) systems and claims that the technology enables the safe and reliable storage of energy at large scale and long durations, without requiring significant scale-up in costs. Company CEO Javier Cavada wrote a technical paper about the LAES systems and their economic appeal for our journal PV Tech Power earlier this year.
Highview has been in the public eye over the past few months after Energy-Storage.news in June reported that several 50MW / 250MWh sites are in development in the company’s homeland, as well as the potential for development in the US.
“We will start construction next year, we have commenced agreements, we have the firm services to be provided to National Grid and it will be the largest battery system in Europe at 250MWh,” Highview Power’s Javier Cavada told Energy-Storage.news yesterday.
Keeping the decommissioned power plant site ‘on the map’
The project is planned as the first of five of the same size to be developed in the UK by Highview, and Cavada said the choice to replace a fossil fuel plant site on the grid was instrumental.
“We will be using the same connection and the same electrical infrastructure [as the thermal plant], so there is no need to make [new] transmission lines. So where we are they are decommissioning a fossil fuel plant, we will use the same point of [grid] connection for the cryobattery.”
The LAES system will perform many of the same tasks that the thermal plant has done, as well as “getting electrons from the grid that are hopefully more and more renewable every day and shifting them to the right moment to meet demand,” and will be able to provide voltage support, inertia and other services to the grid.
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