Habitat Energy has become the second company to begin trading in the balancing mechanism as a virtual lead party – a new role created to allow parties to operate fleets of aggregate assets without becoming their registered supplier.
The company is using its trading platform to operate two battery storage facilities on behalf the Gresham House Energy Storage Fund.
The sites have a combined generation/storage of capacity of 69MW/100MWh and include a 49MW/74MWh facility at Red Scar business park in Lancashire, which is now the largest battery being traded in the balancing mechanism.
Habitat Energy entered the assets into the market on 2 September and responded to requests from National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) more than 80 times on its first day of trading.
Phil Robinson, co-founder and director of Habitat Energy, said: “The balancing mechanism represents a core revenue opportunity for batteries. It’s great for the industry that National Grid ESO’s wider access initiative is having a real impact.”
He continued: “We are delighted to be offering our customers another revenue stream to the day ahead, intraday, imbalance and ancillary service markets where we are already active with our 150MWh portfolio.”
Gresham House managing director Ben Guest said: “This is an important milestone for Habitat and the projects they optimise for Gresham House Energy Storage Fund. We are delighted to have reached this stage together.”
The role of virtual lead party was created through the Balancing and Settlement Code modification P344, which was approved by Ofgem in August 2018. The modification took effect the following February and shortly afterwards the code manager Elexon opened the registration process to become a virtual lead party.
The ESO revealed in December 2019 that virtual lead parties were finally able to enter the balancing mechanism, although it wasn’t until this April that Flexitricity became the first company to do so using two batteries owned by a food wholesaler in Devon.