Envision Energy, a Chinese multinational corporation, has announced a strategic partnership with the UK's Harmony Energy Income Trust to provide battery energy storage systems (BESS) for power plant projects in Wormald Green and Hawthorn Pit. The liquid-cooled energy storage systems developed by Envision Energy will enable time-shifting of energy, capacity services, and frequency regulation services.
Harmony Energy Income Trust currently operates 109MW/218MWh of BESS in the UK, with a further 286.4MW/572.8MWh under construction. The company's asset value grew by 24.84% to £257.8 million in its first full year since the IPO, with demand for storage assets surging in Britain. To acquire and construct its first pipeline of projects, Harmony Energy secured a debt finance facility of up to £60 million from NatWest, which included an accordion for a further £70 million.
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The Wormald Green and Hawthorn Pit projects are included in Harmony Energy's project pipeline, and their BESS units are set to commence manufacturing in Q2 2023, with full completion and grid connection expected by Q1 2024. The storage capacity of Wormald Green is 33MW/66MWh, while Hawthorn Pit has a slightly higher storage capacity of 49.9MW/99.8Mh.
Envision Energy's expertise ranges from battery technologies to energy storage systems, including two-hour duration BESS. This could help strengthen Harmony Energy's vision, as the company is also exploring two-hour duration BESS projects. By the end of the first year since its incorporation, Harmony Energy had six two-hour duration BESS projects totalling 312.5MW/625MWh.
In a recent conversation with Solar Power Portal, Harmony Energy's CEO, Peter Kavanagh expressed his concerns around grid connection delays and their impact on the market. He believes that anyone coming into the industry now will struggle to find any connections that can connect before 2030.
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Kavanagh also expressed doubts about very large projects that rely on a single point of connection, saying, “you're talking about a lot of risk on a single point of connection, say, for example, a 400/500MW battery – one transformer at that size takes a long time to order and it's a huge single point of failure.”
