The UK government has backed plans to develop a multi-weight gravity-led 4MWh energy storage system by project developer Gravitricity.
The £912,000 ($1.2 million) grant from the Department of Business Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) will allow the Scotland-based energy storage specialists to move forward with plans for a system.
Gravitricity will work to deliver the front-end engineering design (FEED) alongside control and simulation firm Industrial Systems and Control, and winch specialists Huisman and Careys Civil Engineering.
The FEED study is supported by the BEIS ‘Longer Duration Energy Storage Competition’, a competitive funding scheme to accelerate the commercialisation of innovative energy storage projects.
The project, which will store power by raising and lowering up to 2,000 tonnes in a shaft, now depends on securing the planning consents required to develop and build the energy store at a grid-connected site in northern England. 
A $1.5 million ($2million) feasibility project will be completed late this year, which will provide the information required to start building the full-scale commercial prototype, subject to securing planning permission and the necessary funds.
The company successfully demonstrated a 15 metre (49ft) high, 250kW system where two 25 tonne weights were configured to run independently at Leith docks, Edinburgh, last summer.
Gravitricity’s managing director, Charlie Blair, said the Leith project was able to demonstrate a roundtrip efficiency of more than 80% and the ability to ramp up to full import or export power in less than a second.
The company is also advancing plans to build a full-scale single-weight project that will transform a former Czech coal mine into an energy storage plant with a capacity of up to 8MW.
Innovative energy storage projects
Additional projects that secured funding through BEIS Longer Duration Energy Storage Competition are:
- The Long Duration Offshore Storage Bundle project in Aberdeen, Scotland will be led by Subsea 7 Limited. Subsea 7 Limited and FLASC B.V. will receive £471,760 ($641,000) to further develop the project, which will store energy as a combination of pressurised seawater and compressed air, using an innovative hydro-pneumatic technology.
- The Vanadium Flow Battery Longer Duration Energy Asset Demonstrator project in Bathgate, Scotland will be led by Invinity Energy Systems. Invinity Energy Systems will receive £708,371 ($950,000) to demonstrate how a 40MWh vanadium flow battery could deliver long duration storage-enabled power on demand from UK-based solar generation.
- The Cheshire Energy Storage Centre project in Cheshire, UK will be led by io consulting. io consulting will receive £1 million ($1.3 million) to enable its consortium to develop an electricity storage facility which could use mothballed EDF gas cavities in Cheshire utilising Hydrostor’s Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage technology.
