Firm frequency response (FFR) services “saved the day” during the blackouts on 9 August, the chairman of Gresham House Energy Storage Fund has claimed.
Writing in the company’s half-year results to 30 June, John Leggate said FFR services avoided a far worse outcome. However he accepted that more needed to be done, as the services “failed in aggregate” to completely avoid a short-duration blackout.
Leggate further claimed that the company’s technical team had already observed “falling inertia” on the system in recent months and that this was evidenced by increasingly common low-frequency events.
He added: “We therefore feel fully justified in our optimism that this new world of a low inertia National Grid will require the development of more battery capacity, which would benefit battery projects such as ours.”
Gresham’s results reported a net asset value increase of 2.7p to 100.7p per share and a total profit-before-tax for the period of £4.4 million.
The company added that it intends to raise debt and is continuing to consider the potential for further share placings to achieve its ambition of acquiring additional pipeline projects.
The fund anticipates it will represent the UK’s largest portfolio of energy storage projects at the end of Q1 2020, with 229MW.
Recently Gresham announced it had purchased a 5MW battery project in Wolverhampton for a total of £3.5 million.
The project, acquired from a vehicle owned by Gresham House DevCo Limited and Noriker Power Limited, primarily imports and exports power for the wholesale market and the balancing mechanism.