The UK’s Department of Business has launched a competition offering up to £20 million (US$26.2m) for “innovative, replicable solutions that could provide a market competitive alternative to conventional commercial large scale energy storage technologies.”
To be eligible for the competition funds, projects must demonstrate “a target minimum output power of 30MW or minimum capacity of 50MWh.”
The scope of the competition includes “a broad range of large-scale energy storage technologies over a range of durations, capacity and response times.”
Power-to-X technologies with a minimum input power of 5MW would also be considered eligible under the competition rubric.
But the competition specifically excludes projects based on “battery, pumped-hydro, other energy storage technologies, which are already widely commercially available at this scale in the UK or elsewhere”.
The launch of this competition and the level of funding made available demonstrate the increasing recognition that “innovative large-scale energy storage will play an important role in decarbonising industry, power, heat and transport”, the government said.
The funding will be available from 2019 to 2021, with winners to be announced in July 2019. The competition will support up to three demonstration projects that will have completed construction by March 2021, and completed operational testing by December the same year.
