Europe's biggest battery energy storage system has gone online, with the Pillswood, Cottingham, site becoming operational.
In the face of potential energy storages over winter due to the war in the Ukraine, the launch was fast tracked by up to two months, but Harmony Energy successfully flicked the switch on the project that provides critical balancing services to the UK’s electricity grid network, employing a Tesla 2-hour Megapack system to store up to 196 MWh of electricity in a single cycle. The project will be operated through Autobidder, Tesla’s algorithmic trading platform.
The site is located adjacent to National Grid’s Creyke Beck substation, the same connection point proposed for phases “A” and “B” of the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Dogger Bank, which is set to go live on the first phase in Summer 2023, and it will enable the National Grid to maximise the efficiency of these wind farms by reducing the amount of time a wind farm needs to be switched off, ‘curtailed’, due to supply/demand imbalances or network constraints.
Peter Kavanagh, Harmony Energy director, said: “The completion and energisation of the Pillswood scheme, the largest of its kind in Europe by energy capacity, is a significant milestone for Harmony Energy Income Trust, being the first of six similar projects the Trust intends to deliver in the coming year.”
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