Harmony Energy has successfully energised the Pillswood project, a 98MW capacity battery energy storage system.
Located in East Yorkshire, the system employs a Tesla 2-hour Megapack system, allowing it to store up to 196MWh of electricity in a single cycle. This is enough electricity to power around 300,000 UK homes for two hours.
The site is located adjacent to National Grid’s Creyke Beck substation, the same connection point proposed for phases “A” and “B” of the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Dogger Bank, which is set to go live on the first phase in summer 2023. Batteries enable National Grid to maximise the efficiency of wind farms by reducing the amount of time a wind farm needs to be switched off, ‘curtailed’, due to supply/demand imbalances or network constraints.
The project was originally intended to become operational over two phases in December 2022 and March 2023, but the timetable has accelerated to enable both phases to energise this month, in time to support National Grid in its efforts to provide stable and secure power to UK households over the challenging winter period.
Construction of the Pillswood project has been managed by Tesla. The project will be operated through Autobidder, Tesla’s algorithmic trading platform.
Peter Kavanagh, Harmony Energy Director, said: “The completion and energisation of the Pillswood scheme, the largest of its kind in Europe by energy capacity, is a significant milestone for Harmony Energy Income Trust, being the first of six similar projects the Trust intends to deliver in the coming year.”
“It is also a significant achievement for Harmony Energy Limited: this project is the third, and largest, battery energy storage project which we have developed and subsequently delivered through construction. All stakeholders have recognised the importance of achieving energisation for this project ahead of winter, and we would like to thank Tesla, G2 Energy and Northern Powergrid for their efforts in delivering the project ahead of schedule despite a very challenging geopolitical and global supply chain environment.”
Harmony Energy develops, builds, owns and operates wind, solar and battery energy storage assets to assist in the creation of a sustainable renewable energy.