Shell shells out for flex trades from Europe’s first centurion battery

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Doubling up storage capacity in a Wiltshire village to make Europe’s first 100 MW battery storage system is about to pay off, Shell Energy Europe hopes.

The hydrocarbon giant’s clean tech offshoot has announced that the plant’s installation in Minety, near Swindon by developers Penso Power is now complete and ready to trade back up services, including National Grid ESO’s Dynamic Containment.

Limejump, bought in 2019 through Shell’s Netherlands-based New Energies arm, will manage trades enabled by the co-located ternary lithium-centred units.   Shell bought off-take rights to the Wiltshire site early last year, just as Penso were pondering doubling up their initial 50MW concept.

Generator China Huaneng Group and infrastructure investors CNIC have put an undisclosed sum into the rural English development.

“Delivering the Minety project during COVID-19 has been an amazing team effort, and with our colleagues at Shell, we can now focus on optimising Minety’s performance and supporting National Grid ESO,” said Catherine Newman, CEO of Limejump.

The ESO’s Dynamic Containment service is intended for fast kick-in after outages.  It is deployed to correct significant deviations in grid frequency,  answering the system’s most urgent needs for frequency response.

The service is intended to accommodate conditions where the grid is experiencing lower inertia and larger, more numerous losses than ever before.  Faster acting frequency response products are needed because system frequency is moving away from 50Hz more rapidly as a consequence of imbalances.

David Wells, VP Shell Energy Europe, commented,  “Flexible storage and supply systems such as Minety have an essential role in balancing supply and demand, especially as renewable power sources become increasingly central to the UK’s energy needs”.

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