The mining giant Rio Tinto, Centrica and Goldman Sachs have played a key role in a major fundraising for what will be the world’s largest liquid air energy storage plant in the UK.
The £300m funding round will support the company’s first major project. Highview power: a 50 MW, 300 MWh (six hour) facility in Carrington, Manchester. The financing has had the support of the British energy services company Central and the UK Infrastructure Bankas well as a syndicate of investors including Rio, Goldman Sachs and Mosaic Capital.
Liquid air storage is a technology that uses energy to compress and cool air, turning it into liquid for storage. When needed, liquid air can expand and turn into a gas to generate energy. Highview claims it will be able to be stored from six hours to several weeks.
Direct effects in mining
Rio Tinto’s interest in this technology is interesting because it is studying the transition of the energy source of its own portfolio of smelters and refineries in Australia and elsewhere, from its current dependence on coal to wind and solar energy. Storage and dispatchable energy will be key to those plans.
“We believe long-duration energy storage can play a key role in strengthening renewable energy sources,” said Nigel Steward, Rio Tinto’s chief scientific officer, in a statement supporting the investment in Highview.
“The investment from us and other partners is an important step in helping to build a greener, more resilient and stable energy infrastructure for generations to come in the UK and beyond,” he added.
Australia and United Kingdom
Highview Power, which has been working on the technology for 16 years, says it will start building the Manchester project immediately and expects it to be fully operational in less than two years.
It is already exploring opportunities in Australia, particularly in the Northern Territory, where it has begun planning the development of a 90 MW nominal, 10-hour run project on the Katherine-Darwin grid, and a 30 MW, 12-hour facility. hours of operation in Alice Springs, next to the Owen Springs gas fired power station.
According to the company, both projects will combine solar power and lithium-ion storage to provide a baseload supply of renewable energy. Several grid-scale solar plants have been built in the Northern Territory, but they have been idle for years due to changes to the grid dispatch system, which requires them to be backed up with storage.
Highview has also held discussions with Australian companies about several onshore wind projects. It has recently signed a collaboration agreement with the Danish offshore wind energy developer Ørsted.
Highview says it has four further large-scale 2.5GWh installations planned in the UK, representing a total investment of £3bn and which it hopes to commission before 2035.
Centrica has invested £70 million to help fine-tune the rollout of the technology. The UKIB is similar to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation of Australia and helps support pioneering technologies.
Mandatory storage
“There is no energy transition without storage,” Richard Butland, CEO of Highview Power, said in a statement. “The UK’s world-leading investment in offshore wind and renewables requires a national long-duration energy storage program to capture excess wind and support grid transformation.”
“Our first project in Carrington will be the basis for our large-scale rollout in the UK and expansion with partners to share this British technology internationally,” he added.
Julian Leslie, director and chief engineer of National Grid ESO, the market operator in the UK, said that 4 GW of liquid air storage will be needed in the coming decades to support the transition to a 100% zero-carbon electricity system. ”.
