Dive Brief:

• Centrica has selected Younicos to design a 49-MW battery-based energy storage systems at the site of the former Roosecote coal- and gas-fired power stations in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, U.K.

• The lithium-ion system will be owned and operated by Centrica and will be will respond to fluctuations in electrical demand in less than a second.

• Construction on the storage system is slated to start in March and is expected to take around 20 months, entering operation in winter 2018.

Dive Insight:

Younicos was one of the winners of the recent U.K. capacity auction in which energy storage bids won 3.2 GW of provisional contracts for capacity for the winter 2020-21 period.

In all, storage garnered about 6% of the 52 GW of capacity contracts awarded in the auction.

“With prices for renewable power as well as for battery technology in steep and continuous decline, battery storage systems are the best solution to quickly build more flexible, stable and cost-effective grids,” Younicos CEO Stephen Prince said in a statement.

In November, Younicos teamed up with Panasonic for a 1-MW, 2-MWh storage system in Denver, Colorado, that will be part of a wider solar power and microgrid facility.

In addition to the Younicos storage project, Centrica also plans to build two other projects, two 50-MW fast response distributed generation gas-fired plants at Brigg in North East Lincolnshire and Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, and a 370-MW combined-cycle gas turbine at King’s Lynn in Norfolk.