British firm the Highview Power is taking its innovative cryogenic or liquid air storage from demonstration to commercial scale. The move follows the success of its 5 MW pathfinder project built next to a landfill site in Bury, Greater Manchester, on July 2018 with £ 8M of funding from Innovate UK.
The company has finally identified the site, and the funding for its first large-scale system, it said yesterday. Planned to have a capacity of 50 megawatts/250 megawatt-hours, Highview Power expects to have it up by 2022, creating capacity to provide power to up to 50,000 homes for 5 hours.
The project will be keenly watched by those in the renewable energy sector, for the potential it offers in terms of balancing renewable energy demand. This is because the project, as per claims by Highview, would cost about £110 per MWh of electricity, using a 200MW system, making its cryobattery one of the cheapest energy storage technologies. This compares with a lithium battery storage cost of over £360 per MWh currently. This high cost has opened up the market for a range of alternate technologies to try and crack open the storage market, and in effect, open up the larger energy markets for renewables even more.