The battery storage was ~$200M. Pure prismatic lifepo cells are currently ~$60 per kWh in single digit quantities (would be $40M or 20% of total costs, which seems reasonable). The attached 450MW gas power plant cost ~$350M.
I find it rather remarkable how they aquired the contracts in early 2023 and the thing is already running.
It's promising how costs are dropping. CATL have recently announced sodium ion batteries with a cost around $40 per kWh and material costs around $10 so there's room for things to drop as production scales. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/08/catl-sodium-ion-batter...
CATL and BYD are both building 30 GWh per year plants or 60 GWh between them so that's enough for 100 Tilbury plants per year just from sodium batteries. And of course lithium batteries are still cranking along.
63days from start to completion. Paid itself off in 2 years. Saved consumers well over $100million/yr across the state in power bill reductions (only 1.8million people in that state and this is after the battery owners took their profit).
There's really nothing but positives from grid scale batteries. They cut out all those <0 and >100x price fluctuations on the grid and the payoff for investors is ridiculous right now.
I wonder if that growth comes from grid-scale batteries or from domestic installations. There are huge government incentives for installing a home battery system and connecting it to a VPP, so I wonder if the policy is focused at the domestic or grid level.
> This landmark 300MW battery storage site is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes with instantaneous power over two hours
Power is 300MW (300000000 Joules/second), which it can deliver for 2 hours, so capacity (energy contained in the device) is 600 MWh (or 2160000000000 Joules)
It effectively decouples for any period when no gas is needed; so if those batteries let you turn off the gas generators for an hour the price decouples from gas.
While this is worthwhile, I think that the parent post may be referring more to the "UK Electricity price" to consumers, and how this is calculated. It is related, but not quite the same as "roll out more renewables faster and so burn less gas"
> "If we actually paid the average price of what our electricity now costs to produce, our bills would be substantially cheaper."
> In simple terms: the price in the electricity market on any given day is dictated by the most expensive source of generation available, which in the UK would be its gas-fired power plants.
I support "roll out more renewables faster" and pricing reform. Linked article makes it clear that the UK has "one of the most expensive electricity markets in the world" and this impacts consumers and businesses.
Which does raise the question: who benefits from the current pricing arrangement, and why do they have the deciding vote?
That will never happen. They'll use that excuse until the very last gas powered plant is alive and then there will immediately be some other reason why energy prices have to stay the way they are.
Does the UK not have an option for hourly-pricing? That's usually where as a consumer you can have the most gains. In the summer, with solar panels, my energy bill is negative (in The Netherlands)
Some suppliers (e.g., Octopus Energy) offer half-hourly tariffs whose rates track the day-ahead wholesale market and are published daily. Prices usually fall when supply is abundant (e.g., windy/sunny periods)
The UK has a stupid system where the pricing for everything is determined by the most expensive thing in the mix:
>The UK’s electricity market operates using a system known as “marginal pricing”. This means that all of the power plants running in each half-hour period are paid the same price, set by the final generator that has to switch on to meet demand, which is known as the “marginal” unit.
i.e. if you have 99 units of solar but have 100 demand, 1 unit of gas plant fires up to fill it then all 100 units are compensated at the gas rate even if the wind was cheap.
You do realize that this is coupled with a 450MW gas power plant?
Gas is a really appealing backup option for both renewable and nuclear powered grids (at least in the absence of freely available hydropower).
But as installed power/capacity grows and batteries get cheaper, reliance on gas will hopefully decrease (and supply might get bolstered by renewable-powered synthgas within the next decades).
It's more about the negative effect that using gas has on the wholesale price of energy; electricity prices are determined by the most expensive source at that point in time. So we either need to get gas usage to 0, or change how that wholesale price is calculated in order to see a consumer benefit.
We had an interesting case here in the Netherlands, where at the moment the biggest problem for big battery operations is to get sufficient grid transmission capacity. One clever company bought the site of a bankrupt aluminium smelter for cents on the euro, purely because said smelter had a direct high capacity connection to the national high voltage grid. Getting the rest of the site and the machinery was just a bonus.
> However I have yet to see Battery storage feature in the charts for UK energy usage yet.
There are also four pumped-storage hydroelectric power stations providing a further 2.8 GW of installed electrical generating capacity, and contributing up to 4,075 GWh of peak demand electricity annually.
On one of the sources of grid usage it has a placeholder for batteries but says:
> Several battery storage systems are in operation in Great Britain, but full reporting is not yet available: reports include discharging but not charging. As this would lead to double counting, with power being reported both when originally generated and when discharged from battery storage systems, battery storage data is not yet shown on this site.
Conceptually it is no different from pumped hydro storage. - for that they simply use negative numbers for pumping and positive for release.
I guess it's some technical problem with standardisation/tracking/reporting of the charging right now.
As/if Vehicle-to-Grid becomes more widespread, where you have highly distributed battery storage, it will be interesting to see if this will be publicly tracked.
Already domestic solar production is largely invisible ( as that mostly manifests in reduced demand ).
However I assume, in terms of managing the grid day to day, that such information is going to be important. ( eg if it's a largely cloudly day then that will be manifest as a rise in domestic demand ).
That one claims to Europe's biggest, this one is claiming to be the UKs biggest which I guess means an even larger one went live in Europe somewhere in between.
> However I have yet to see Battery storage feature in the charts for UK energy usage yet.
Grid connected batteries are more about aiding grid stability, filling short term mismatches between loads and renewable generators, rather than raw capacity in terms of kWh.
About 10-15 percentage points less efficient because of losses pumping the water uphill though, and slower to react (seconds vs milliseconds) which will probably force it out of the fast frequency response market which batteries have rapidly saturated.
It's pretty much tailor made for batteries and flywheels. 2 seconds is not feasible for pumped hydro, though it still is impressively fast at less than 30 seconds. It is interesting how all of these technologies have their sweet spots.
This project won't do anything (as you likely already know). The reason electricity is so expensive is because it's tied to gas prices, which is an entirely political decision.
Isn't the price tied to the marginal price, rather than the price of gas?
Even if they're typically the same, because CCGT is the best for on-demand generation, flattening the demand curve ought to slightly reduce that marginal cost.
I've seen the UK generation market attacked quite a lot lately, but to me it makes sense to price everything at the marginal cost, and doing so also helps encourage capital investment in generation that can have lower generation costs themselves, because the marginal cost is only slowly impacted rather than a boom and bust model.
The current marginal market price is not the same as the current average price being paid for all electricity delivered. A lot is delivered via fixed price arrangements of one sort or another (CFDs, PPAs, etc) and then there are things like the Balancing Mechanism which is paid as bid, and capacity payments which are outside the marginal cost per kWh part of the system.
Gas prices are a political decision, too in Europe. For demand to reduce and for other sources to be more competitive prices have to be and remain high.
In the UK I believe it is policy for electricity prices to be high in general for thse reasons and to encourage lower usage.
In Australia prices were reduced by over $50 a year per person in the state on average once a similar battery went online. Similar policies and market there to this case too. Details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
I get that it's easy to be pessimistic but batteries like the above not only pay themselves off in 2years (From the article above, $46million profit in one year alone on a $90million install cost!) they also cut prices on the grid from day one.
Behind the scenes prices can fluctuate between <0 and >100x baseline. These types of installations immediately smooth out the costs. As long as you have competing wholesalers/providers the price reductions will come through pretty quickly based on similar cases.
One issue the U.K. has is a grid bottleneck but wiggle pricing across the grid. While excess power may be available in some places, there’s not enough interconnection to move it where it’s needed, so those with excess power (lots of wind etc) can’t benefit.
I think a big reason for net-zero policies getting bad press, is that these kind of things are difficult to quantify. Energy is largely set by gas price, so having more non-gas assets on the grid probably means you do have cheaper energy (or, at least will have much cheaper energy in the future when gas ceases to dictate the energy price)
I guess what we can't do is step into the alternative world where there's less batteries and renewables, and complain about paying $0.6 per kwh.
I call bullshit on this claim. Sure, you might be paying pennies a kWh, but likely only for a few hours at midnight, then it spikes to £0.50 during peak times.
Once there's enough renewables and batteries that the UK is running off of near 100% renewables a decent fraction of the time, so the price is not being set by the gas turbines making up the margin.
Alternatively, the higher the cost of non-renewable energy in a country, the more attractive renewables are in that market.
If gas costs £1 a unit and solar is 90p, solar is profitable (especially if you get paid the gas price). If gas is 50p a unit, solar isn't going to be much of an investment.
What is the chemistry and expected lifetime of the batterries?
They are saying this is for sustainable energy future but it looks like it's using natural gas (not sustainable) powered energy to charge up Lithium(?) batteries that will need to be replaced every n years (also not sustainable). Which part of this facility makes it more sustainable?
The UK often has excess wind energy, and for Tilbury in particular that problem is set to grow as National Grid are building out massive grid capacity from the North Sea wind farms through Tilsbury
Generally LFP with cycles in the at least 5000 range.
They are pure arbiters of the market. Filling up when it makes sense and delivering when it makes sense. Which sometimes means buying expensive fossil gas powered electricity to sell it even higher priced later.
But what this means is that at that ”later” the peaking plant that originally has been used did not have to start and consumers enjoy cheaper electricity.
But what they do is extend the time renewables deliver. In for example California storage has reduced fossil gas usage by 40% in recent years.
A similar project in Australia used Tesla megapack batteries, which are lithium ion.
Another form of stored energy uses thermal. A large scale project to plug ~50,000 idle and abandoned oil wells in Kern County, California.
Probably worth noting that for states and utilities, consumer solar without batteries has become a liability and doesn't scale up. So effectively, all future consumer solar installations in California will likely have batteries. So there will be batteries at the consumer point, and centralized large scale battery farms like this one to address peak demand and prevent situations where blackouts may need to occur.
Readit News
https://www.ess-news.com/2024/11/05/financial-close-for-uk-p...
The battery storage was ~$200M. Pure prismatic lifepo cells are currently ~$60 per kWh in single digit quantities (would be $40M or 20% of total costs, which seems reasonable). The attached 450MW gas power plant cost ~$350M.
I find it rather remarkable how they aquired the contracts in early 2023 and the thing is already running.
CATL and BYD are both building 30 GWh per year plants or 60 GWh between them so that's enough for 100 Tilbury plants per year just from sodium batteries. And of course lithium batteries are still cranking along.
As to what price points for the batteries equates to different usage patterns.
Peak shaving, morning and evening peaks, occasional discharge.
Batteries can make money also by taking negative price electricity.
Once gas has been run out of the market more battery power availability could support carbon free steel I imagine where it is just electrochemistry.
At each point they’d be ruptures in the market, where some forms of electricity just can’t compete.
63days from start to completion. Paid itself off in 2 years. Saved consumers well over $100million/yr across the state in power bill reductions (only 1.8million people in that state and this is after the battery owners took their profit).
There's really nothing but positives from grid scale batteries. They cut out all those <0 and >100x price fluctuations on the grid and the payoff for investors is ridiculous right now.
Australia's expected to 20x it's grid connected battery capacity between 2024 and 2027. The growth in battery storage is ridiculous since the costs have come down. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
I'm pretty sure they have a matching number of positives and negatives.
Edit: The company press release is much clearer: https://stateraenergy.co.uk/news/thurrock-energisation The storage is 300 MWh, but it can deliver a peak of 600 MW/h (presumably for half an hour).
The 300MW Thurrock Storage project... with a total capacity of 600MWh
Power is 300MW (300000000 Joules/second), which it can deliver for 2 hours, so capacity (energy contained in the device) is 600 MWh (or 2160000000000 Joules)
Is there some other plans you support?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/20/why-the-uks...
> "If we actually paid the average price of what our electricity now costs to produce, our bills would be substantially cheaper."
> In simple terms: the price in the electricity market on any given day is dictated by the most expensive source of generation available, which in the UK would be its gas-fired power plants.
I support "roll out more renewables faster" and pricing reform. Linked article makes it clear that the UK has "one of the most expensive electricity markets in the world" and this impacts consumers and businesses.
Which does raise the question: who benefits from the current pricing arrangement, and why do they have the deciding vote?
I am not sure how people still don't realise this after ten years of doing this and energy prices going up non-stop.
Day ahead pricing: https://agileprices.co.uk/ National grid supply/demand and energy mix: https://grid.iamkate.com/
>The UK’s electricity market operates using a system known as “marginal pricing”. This means that all of the power plants running in each half-hour period are paid the same price, set by the final generator that has to switch on to meet demand, which is known as the “marginal” unit.
i.e. if you have 99 units of solar but have 100 demand, 1 unit of gas plant fires up to fill it then all 100 units are compensated at the gas rate even if the wind was cheap.
Gas is a really appealing backup option for both renewable and nuclear powered grids (at least in the absence of freely available hydropower).
But as installed power/capacity grows and batteries get cheaper, reliance on gas will hopefully decrease (and supply might get bolstered by renewable-powered synthgas within the next decades).
These are, dare I say it, the easy wins. Reusing the infrastructure from a demolished coal fired power station.
However I have yet to see Battery storage feature in the charts for UK energy usage yet.
I’m guessing that there are a lot of similar such sets that are being, or could be repurposed for battery storage.
https://giga-storage.com/giga-storage-rondt-financiering-van...
There are also four pumped-storage hydroelectric power stations providing a further 2.8 GW of installed electrical generating capacity, and contributing up to 4,075 GWh of peak demand electricity annually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United...
> Several battery storage systems are in operation in Great Britain, but full reporting is not yet available: reports include discharging but not charging. As this would lead to double counting, with power being reported both when originally generated and when discharged from battery storage systems, battery storage data is not yet shown on this site.
I guess it's some technical problem with standardisation/tracking/reporting of the charging right now.
As/if Vehicle-to-Grid becomes more widespread, where you have highly distributed battery storage, it will be interesting to see if this will be publicly tracked.
Already domestic solar production is largely invisible ( as that mostly manifests in reduced demand ).
However I assume, in terms of managing the grid day to day, that such information is going to be important. ( eg if it's a largely cloudly day then that will be manifest as a rise in domestic demand ).
Very much aimed at storing surplus from a couple of wind farms in the Moray Firth.
Presumably we'll see a lot more of these given the scale of some of the new windfarms...
Grid connected batteries are more about aiding grid stability, filling short term mismatches between loads and renewable generators, rather than raw capacity in terms of kWh.
Even if they're typically the same, because CCGT is the best for on-demand generation, flattening the demand curve ought to slightly reduce that marginal cost.
I've seen the UK generation market attacked quite a lot lately, but to me it makes sense to price everything at the marginal cost, and doing so also helps encourage capital investment in generation that can have lower generation costs themselves, because the marginal cost is only slowly impacted rather than a boom and bust model.
They'll also likely reduce the balancing costs by relieving congestion.
Probably too small to notice among all the other costs and changes, like deploying more renewables and starting to pay in advance for new nuclear.
In the UK I believe it is policy for electricity prices to be high in general for thse reasons and to encourage lower usage.
In Australia prices were reduced by over $50 a year per person in the state on average once a similar battery went online. Similar policies and market there to this case too. Details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
I get that it's easy to be pessimistic but batteries like the above not only pay themselves off in 2years (From the article above, $46million profit in one year alone on a $90million install cost!) they also cut prices on the grid from day one.
Behind the scenes prices can fluctuate between <0 and >100x baseline. These types of installations immediately smooth out the costs. As long as you have competing wholesalers/providers the price reductions will come through pretty quickly based on similar cases.
I guess what we can't do is step into the alternative world where there's less batteries and renewables, and complain about paying $0.6 per kwh.
The lowest mine goes is $0.3 1am-4am.
Deleted Comment
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bjorn-lomborg-solar-wind-p...
If gas costs £1 a unit and solar is 90p, solar is profitable (especially if you get paid the gas price). If gas is 50p a unit, solar isn't going to be much of an investment.
Just look at all the unnamed points in the lower left that are actually creating the trend he claims to have found.
If you graph developed nations the correlation reverses.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/more-misinforma...
The UK often has excess wind energy, and for Tilbury in particular that problem is set to grow as National Grid are building out massive grid capacity from the North Sea wind farms through Tilsbury
They are pure arbiters of the market. Filling up when it makes sense and delivering when it makes sense. Which sometimes means buying expensive fossil gas powered electricity to sell it even higher priced later.
But what this means is that at that ”later” the peaking plant that originally has been used did not have to start and consumers enjoy cheaper electricity.
But what they do is extend the time renewables deliver. In for example California storage has reduced fossil gas usage by 40% in recent years.
Another form of stored energy uses thermal. A large scale project to plug ~50,000 idle and abandoned oil wells in Kern County, California.
Probably worth noting that for states and utilities, consumer solar without batteries has become a liability and doesn't scale up. So effectively, all future consumer solar installations in California will likely have batteries. So there will be batteries at the consumer point, and centralized large scale battery farms like this one to address peak demand and prevent situations where blackouts may need to occur.
https://eepower.com/news/engineers-repurpose-oil-wells-as-so...