The UK Government has announced funding awards for new renewable energy storage technologies being developed in the country.
It has awarded £6.7m (€8m) awarded to 24 projects based across the UK have been awarded the first round of funding through the Longer Duration Energy Storage competition which is worth £68m in total.
These projects will develop new energy storage technologies that can utilise stored energy as heat, electricity or as a low-carbon energy carrier like hydrogen under phase 1 of the project.
Ranging from the development of thermal batteries to converting energy to hydrogen, they have been selected because of their potential to improve technology performance and reduce the cost of meeting net zero.
Phase 2 of the programme will see the remainder of the £68m funding awarded to several of the most promising Phase 1 projects, to proceed to build and demonstrate their technology fully.
Selecting projects for the next stage will take place upon the completion of Phase 1, whereby projects will be assessed based on their potential to commercialise their technologies, encouraging private investment and creating new jobs.
Energy & Climate Change Minister Greg Hands (pictured) said: “Driving forward energy storage technologies will be vital in our transition towards cheap, clean and secure renewable energy.
“It will allow us to extract the full benefit from our home-grown renewable energy sources, drive down costs and end our reliance on volatile and expensive fossil fuels.
“Through this competition we are making sure the country’s most innovative scientists and thinkers have our backing to make this ambition a reality.
The energy storage projects receiving funding today includes Sunamp’s EXTEND thermal battery project in East Lothian, Scotland, Cheesecake Energy’s thermal and compressed air energy storage FlexiTanker project in Nottingham, England, and the B9 Energy Storage’s Ballylumford Power-to-X project, based at Larne, Northern Ireland.
Gravitricity has secured a £912,000 grant to develop plans for a multi-weight energy storage system – to be built on a brownfield site in the UK.
The Edinburgh-based energy storage specialists will work alongside control and simulation experts Industrial Systems and Control (ISC), winch specialists Huisman and Careys Civil Engineering to deliver the front-end engineering design (FEED) for a 4MWh, multi-weight system using a custom-built shaft.
Gravitricity managing director Charlie Blair said: “Finding low-cost, long-life ways to store renewable power will be crucial in the world’s journey to net zero.
“Our multi weight concept has been proven by our Leith demonstrator where two 25 tonne weights were configured to run independently, delivering smooth continuous output when lowered one after the other.
“We were able to demonstrate a roundtrip efficiency of more than 80% and the ability to ramp up to full import or export power in less than a second.”