The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has granted £6.7 million to 24 projects for the first phase of its £68 million Longer Duration Energy Storage Demonstration (LODES) competition.
Five projects have been awarded funding to support actual demonstration projects under stream one, whilst a further 19 projects been allocating funding to support prototype projects under stream two.
Energy and climate change minister Greg Hands 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 five projects to be awarded funding under stream one are:
- Ballylumford Power-to-X – B9 Energy Storage will receive £960,000 to deploy a 20MW membrane-free electrolyser at Ballylumford in North Ireland to produce green hydrogen that will be stored in local underground salt caverns.
- Gravistore – Gravitricity will receive £912,000 to design a multi-weight gravitational energy storage demonstrator that will store and discharge energy by raising and lowering weights in a vertical underground shaft in Northern England.
- Long Duration Offshore Storage Bundle – Subsea 7 and FLASC will receive £472,000 to further develop their project at Aberdeen in Scotland, which will store energy using a combination of pressurised seawater and compressed air.
- Vanadium Flow Battery Longer Duration Energy Asset Demonstrator – Invinity Energy Systems will receive £708,000 to develop a project to store solar generation using a 10MW/40MWh vanadium flow battery.
- Cheshire Energy Storage Centre – IO Consulting will receive £1 million to enable its consortium to develop a project to store energy in mothballed gas storage cavities in Cheshire using Hydrostor’s advanced compressed air energy storage technology.
The 19 projects awarded funding under stream two include:
- Extend – Sunamp will receive £150,000 to further develop the storage duration of their thermal batteries and pair them with domestic energy management system.
- HyDUS – A consortium led by EDF R&D UK will receive £150,000 to transfer and modify a technology to store energy as hydrogen within depleted uranium hydride.
- Ripcurl – ITM Power will receive £149,000 to explore alternative materials to reduce the reliance on platinum group metals in its electrolysers.
- Sustainable Single Liquid Flow Battery – StorTera will receive £149,000 to specify and cost a MW-scale demonstrator of lithium sulphur-based flow battery technology.
- e-Zinc Energy Storage Systems – e-Zinc will receive £145,000 to accelerate the commercialisation of its technology, which stores energy in zinc metal.
Sunamp chief executive Andrew Bissell said: “For the past decade, we have focused on decarbonising hot water and have delivered a world-beating 20,000 heat batteries using our phase change material into the market so far, and we are now bringing forward our Central Bank products for heat.
“Our thermal storage technology can be combined with heat pumps to deliver more than twice as much heat per unit of electricity on demand than direct electric heating.
“This funding will accelerate how we can further enhance thermal storage duration, working with wind energy from the grid and solar PV in homes, to provide heat and water during extended intervals of low renewables generation when green power is not available on the grid, eventually reducing the overall cost of operation to be lower than gas.”
Larry Zulch, chief executive at Invinity Energy Systems, said: “The LODES initiatives are yet another demonstration of the UK’s commitment to building a thriving low carbon economy. Invinity greatly appreciates BEIS’s vision for that future, especially the vital role that safe, reliable and robust long-duration energy storage has to play on a Net Zero UK electric grid.
“In realizing that vision we are tremendously pleased to be working again with BEIS, Pivot Power and EDF to plan the deployment of a vanadium flow battery eight times the size of the one currently operating at Energy Superhub Oxford.”