Last week welcomed some positive news coming from the UK Battery Storage Project Database Report.
Solar Power Portal provided an excellent summary of the report, and below are some key highlights. The positive outlook supports what we are seeing on the recruitment side, with an increase in new roles coming in from the Energy Storage sector, not just in the UK, but across Europe and the USA.
2020 and 2021 project pipeline – highlights
- total pipeline of battery storage projects in the UK has now reached over 13.5GW
- 3GW at ready-to-build stage, (with planning permission and grid connection)
- diverse range of project types and companies bringing them forward
- average size for projects at the ready-to-build stage is 26MW, up from 20MW in 2019
- new applications continue to increase – nearly 1GW of applications submitted in the second half of 2019 and over 200MW of new applications so far in 2020
- large number of proposed projects of 49.9MW currently proposed; in the short term, the limit will remain at the 50MW mark as the timeline for changing the rules (around projects larger than 50MW having to apply as NIS projects) is not yet clear.
- there are some large projects at the 100MW and higher level proposed; most of these are for existing generation sites as fossil power stations coming offline.
- increase in co-location – with new and retrofitted wind farms, plus many of the new solar sites have the option to add energy storage if costs and revenues justify
- portfolios – some wind developers are working on portfolios of wind farms plus storage
- beginning to see a shift towards slightly longer durations of one to two hours, as batteries operate in markets with different requirements
- the next 12 months is set to see the capacity built increasing rapidly
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