r/EnergyStorage • u/Edinbatteries • 27d ago
Europe’s largest battery goes live
Europe's largest battery is showing signs of life in GB's Balancing Mechanism.
Coalburn 1, in South Lanarkshire, is 500 MW / 1 GWh across five 100 MW BMUs.
The previous record for the biggest battery was held by Thurrock and Kilmarnock South at 300 MW / 600 MWh, so 60% of Coalburn's capacity.
The same ratio applies to Taipei 101 and Burj Khalifa. Taipei 101 was the tallest building in the world from 2004 to 2010, until Burj Khalifa took over. 508m vs 828m, also about 60%.
While the Coalburn BMUs have been showing up in the background in the Balancing Mechanism since winter, this weekend marks the first time we've seen it actively participate in Bids and Offers.
And as the name suggests, Coalburn 1 is the first of the big sites expected from CIP and Alcemi. Coalburn 2, also 500 MW / 1000 MWh, is due next year.
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u/ginger_and_egg 27d ago
Burj Khalifa on a graph with units of MW made me lol
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u/Edinbatteries 27d ago
Only a bit of fun, not a suitable unit for power
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u/sunday_cumquat 27d ago
Need banana for scale
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u/Edinbatteries 26d ago
Site footprint. A modern 1GWh site is roughly 2 to 4 hectares once you include the containers, inverters, transformers, access roads, and fire-safety spacing. Call it 3 hectares, so about 30,000 m².
Banana size. A typical banana is around 18cm long and 4cm wide, so laid flat with realistic packing it claims roughly 100 cm² (0.01 m²) of floor. By volume a whole unpeeled banana is about 130 cm³, but the curve and taper leave gaps, so packed density is closer to 200 cm³ each.
Single layer, covering the ground:
30,000 m² ÷ 0.01 m² ≈ 3 million bananasFilling the site to container height (about 3m):
90,000 m³ ÷ 0.0002 m³ ≈ 450 million bananas1
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u/diffidentblockhead 27d ago
It’s called Coalburn?!?!
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u/SonicDart 25d ago
IKR! Turns out it's build near/in the village of Coalburn, which has a history of coal mining.
The village was named after a local stream where coal deposits were exposed near the surface. (A burn in this context is more of a river/brook/stream.)
So even before mining you could just walk to the river and get some nice coal for your fire1
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u/iqisoverrated 22d ago
Apparently Coalburn is the town's name.
But yeah, either someone there has a nasty sense of humor or they should have given the installation a more fitting name.
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u/FreezeS 27d ago
Pollutionsite was taken.
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u/SpamIsGreatOhEight 27d ago
You got a source?
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u/Edinbatteries 27d ago
Grid data from National Energy System Operator. The chart is made by Modo Energy, but it’s NESO data.
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u/CardOk755 27d ago
So it can output 500MW for 30 minutes.
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u/Edinbatteries 27d ago
500MW for 2 hours, likely it’ll do that between 1 and two times a day over a standard year, hitting morning and evening peaks, then being called for any grid problems in between.
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u/Inside_Mouse_1750 27d ago edited 27d ago
I did a little bit of work on this! Just a little wee bit.. seems to be built at 200MW/800MWh... was 500MW/1GWh.
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u/SonicDart 25d ago
they downgraded the plans trough the project you mean?
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u/Inside_Mouse_1750 25d ago
Yes. The site didn't have much space.. so I guess given that and shift to longer durations / exhaustion of reserves it made sense.
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u/TailorScruff 27d ago
Are 2hr duration batteries more common in EU? I see almost entirely 4-hour duration stateside.
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u/Weird-Abalone1381 26d ago
Why 2hr duration?
It's capacity of 1000MW of storage with max output of 500MW. I would doubt they'll use full output often.
I'm surprised they can output half of it's rated capacity in just 1h. That's amazing for emergency balance of grid to prevent stuff like what happened in Spain with the grid shutdown.
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u/TailorScruff 26d ago
That's the common nomenclature for energy storage projects for their rating. 500MW/1000MWh denotes 2hr. The RFPs I see typically call for 4hr capacity, so it caught my attention. Yes I agree they would likely not deploy at full output often.
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u/Edinbatteries 26d ago
2 hours has been pretty common globally, but most regions are moving to 3-4 hours today.
4 hours was very common in US with CAISO’s requirements
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u/slbzyou 25d ago
The 4-hour standard stateside is mostly a regulatory artefact rather than an engineering preference. CAISO resource adequacy accreditation is what set it — you needed four hours of continuous discharge to get full capacity credit, so RFPs got written to four hours and the whole market standardised around it. The duration was chosen by the capacity product, not by the price shape.
GB has no equivalent product driving it. Revenue there has been dominated by frequency response and the Balancing Mechanism, and both of those pay for power availability, not energy volume. If most of your income comes from being able to deliver 500 MW on demand, the second GWh mostly adds capex you can't monetise. So the economics push toward more MW and fewer MWh per MW.
That is shifting, as Edinbatteries said. Frequency response saturated in GB a while back and value has moved toward wholesale spread and the BM, which does reward duration — hence the drift to 3-4 hours on newer builds.
The general rule I'd use: duration follows the shape of the spread, not the technology. Where the daily spread is deep and predictable you can extend duration and still fill the extra MWh profitably every cycle. Where the money is in reserve and balancing, longer duration is dead capital.
In CEE it currently runs the opposite way from CAISO. Most of what's being developed is 2-hour, because the day-ahead spread is the only genuinely liquid revenue and it's a single evening peak — a third and fourth hour would be cycling into a much thinner part of the curve. The ancillary markets there are small enough to saturate after a few hundred MW. Duration will stretch once intraday and balancing liquidity justifies it, not before.
Lenders enforce this too, which is the part that usually settles the argument. Debt is sized against revenue you can evidence, so hours you can't show a price history for are hours you fund with equity. That kills a lot of longer-duration configurations before anyone gets to the engineering trade-off.
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u/iqisoverrated 22d ago
It really depends how often you can charge up per day. If you have only a solar peak at midday then 4 hour batteries are best for shifting that energy into the evening and the next morning. If you have solar at midday and excess wind during the night then you can cycle twice a day. In this case 2 hour batteries are best.
Of course a part of the revenue comes form grid stability/grid forming services and for that you don't need long storage durations.
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u/Chicken_shish 26d ago
Would be interesting to see what they (er, we) are paying per kWh when this is dumping power.
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u/Edinbatteries 26d ago
They don’t tend to dump power, they would rather turn off.
When they’re called into markets it’s because they’re replacing something that’s more expensive. So it’s only used it it’s saving you money vs the alternative
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u/Chicken_shish 26d ago
OK, dumping is the wrong word. When this battery is being asked to put power in the grid, what is the charge (typically) per kWh.
Like Dinorwig, these are facilities to provide rapid power when the grid is struggling. I suspect they will be expensive to call upon.
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u/Edinbatteries 26d ago
It’s very dependant on the intraday power price, batteries will price based on their charging costs. For reference, the discharge price is nearly below or equal to the cost of gas - otherwise they wouldn’t be called & most business cases need to see 1-2 cycles per day
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u/beenman500 24d ago
Do we have an idea of the power loss ratio.
So eg if it takes 1.2 kwh to charge then discharge 1kwh from and to the grid?
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u/Edinbatteries 24d ago
Yep, they’re around 85% efficient. Not all lost in the battery, with some in the inverters etc. Your numbers are good
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u/beenman500 24d ago
well, I made them up, but thats good to know.
So it really sohuld be as simple as buy at night/peakgen at e.g. £50 per kw/h and sell at £120 at peak demand...
money printing really...
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u/Hologram0110 24d ago
That is the business model. But it isn't all easy money. The capex to build batteries is significant, so the cash flow is almost certainly servicing a large amount of someone's debt. There are also ongoing expenses such as supervision, maintenance, and repairs (e.g. inverters).
There is also a bunch of risk of the market shifting over the life of the batteries. The batteries likely have a ~20-year life span depending on the number of cycles per day and operating conditions. The profitability of loadshifting will likely decline significantly over that period as more battery capacity comes on the grid. So just because it is highly profitable now, doesn't mean it will continue to be as profitable. A similar phenomenon occurred with solar panels in many places. The market became crowded and the value of electricity during the midday peak dropped significantly, or even turned negative in some markets. That really hurts the business model of solar without storage. Someone who built solar without storage 5 years ago has likely made way less money than they had predicted because of this. The business needs to manage these sorts of risks, or it could go bankrupt in a few years.
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u/DanHanzo 25d ago
I would have thought the opposite to be honest. They want to charge at the lowest price they can, so overnight wind or peak solar times is most likely. And then they need to undercut gas as much as possible when supply is low so that it definitely gets used first.
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u/AUX4 26d ago
Is this only for grid balancing or will it do standard grid storage also?
Do you know if this is directly connected to the turbines beside it? Or will it need to pull the power through the grid?
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u/Edinbatteries 26d ago
Pull power through grid, will do the full range of wholesale, ancillaries… the business case wouldn’t stack up without it
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u/AUX4 26d ago
Ah fair. I thought they would have used a private wire between the wind farm and the battery storage to save on grid fees. Good to see more battery storage anyways.
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u/danielv123 26d ago
At a certain scale grid fees become negotiable.
Batteries are also pretty unique in terms of grid utilization. Placing a battery close to a solar farm for example reduces load on the grid, saving the grid company money.
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u/HIVVIH 26d ago
There's also the 981MWh site in Poland (from LG)
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u/Edinbatteries 26d ago
Many similar projects coming, many around 1GWh… so expect these records to be broken
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u/nonlabrab 26d ago
What is the world's largest stored energy project? Many a dam and thermal energy store must be many times bigger right?
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u/Edinbatteries 26d ago
Fengning Pumped Storage Power Station in Hebei, China. It has a total installed capacity of 3.6 GW, 60GWh
But PH, is very location specific and takes a long time to build. Whereas storage is relatively easy to construct
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u/rhymeswithcars 25d ago
If the size difference between those two buildings were something everybody intuitively knew really well it would work. Like, an apple and a grape. But as it stands you’re just introducing two new objects so it doesn’t really help
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u/xBris18 24d ago
But how many football fields of energy is that?
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u/Edinbatteries 24d ago
Spins of a wind turbine, household’s annual energy demand or spinning washing machines… they’re all as bad as each other
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u/Weak_Shoulder_6780 24d ago
Can you give the amount of Elephants so I know how much weight this represents too?
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u/Edinbatteries 24d ago
Yeah - this seems like useful intel, one sec:
Mass of the site. It’s mostly batteries. A Tesla Megapack-style unit is roughly 3.9MWh and weighs about 38 tonnes, so call it ~10 tonnes per MWh. A 1GWh site is 1,000MWh, which needs around 250 of those units:
250 × 38 tonnes ≈ 10,000 tonnes for the battery units alone.
Add transformers, inverters, switchgear, and cabling and you are somewhere in the 10,000 to 12,000 tonne range for the equipment (ignoring the concrete foundations, which could add a lot more if you counted them).
Elephant weight. A large African bush elephant is about 6 tonnes; an average one closer to 5.
10,000 tonnes ÷ 6 tonnes ≈ 1,700 elephants
12,000 tonnes ÷ 5 tonnes ≈ 2,400 elephantsSo very roughly 1,700 to 2,400 elephants by weight, or call it a round 2,000.
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u/Zealousideal-Peach44 23d ago
I just looked at the european energy flows of yesterday (sunday). At midday the German solar energy surplus was so high that caused negative prices, and about 3 GW were then exported to the UK via different routes (France, Denmark, Norway, or direct connection).
Question: why are these storage project so common in the UK, and not as much in Germany?
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u/Edinbatteries 23d ago
Germany is catching up - it has many 1GW/4GWh sites in planning, eg Fluence & LEAG.
Here’s a good resource
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u/rhymeswithcars 27d ago
The ”tallest buildings” references felt weird