The 300MW Thurrock Storage project, developed by Statera Energy, is now energised and delivering electricity flexibly to the network across London and the south east.With a total capacity of 600MWh,…
The 300MW Thurrock Storage project, developed by Statera Energy, is now energised and delivering electricity flexibly to the network across London and the south east.
With a total capacity of 600MWh, Thurrock Storage is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes, and can help to balance supply and demand by soaking up surplus clean electricity and discharging it instantaneously when the grid needs it.
Our Tilbury substation once served a coal plant, and with battery connections like this, it’s today helping to power a more sustainable future for the region and the country.
National Grid reinforced its Tilbury substation to ensure the network in the region could safely carry the battery’s significant additional load, with new protection and control systems installed to ensure a robust connection.
The substation previously served the coal-fired Tilbury A and B power stations on adjacent land prior to their demolition, so the connection of the Thurrock Storage facility marks a symbolic transition from coal to clean electricity at the site.
John Twomey, director of customer and network development at National Grid Electricity Transmission, said:
“Battery storage plays a vital role in Britain’s clean energy transition. Connecting Thurrock Storage, the UK’s biggest battery, to our transmission network marks a significant step on that journey.
“Our Tilbury substation once served a coal plant, and with battery connections like this, it’s today helping to power a more sustainable future for the region and the country.”
Tom Vernon, Statera Energy CEO and founder, said:
“We are delighted that Thurrock Storage is now energised, following its successful connection to the grid by National Grid Electricity Transmission. Increasing BESS capacity is essential for supporting the grid when renewable generation, such as solar and wind, is low or changes quickly. It ensures that energy can be stored efficiently and returned to the grid whenever it’s needed.”
National Grid is continuing work at Tilbury substation to connect the 450MW Thurrock Flexible Generation facility, another Statera project that is set to support the energy needs of the region.
The connection of the UK’s biggest battery follows energisation in July of the 373MW Cleve Hill Solar Park in Kent – the largest solar plant in the country – which National Grid connected to its adjacent Cleve Hill substation.
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Found some older article on financing/timeline since there's not much info here:
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.
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.
It would be interesting to read up on the economics of power storage.
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.
The trouble with "use free electricity" schemes is that the capital cost never sleeps: you have built a fixed plant, on a piece of land, and paid for that, regardless of whether it runs or not. So there's usually a fairly high minimum duty cycle to make it economically viable.
You could make the argument in the other direction: the AI training datacenters could run for 23/24 hours, saving electricity at the peak time when it's most expensive and when they're pushing up the cost of electricity for everyone else the most .. but of course all those GPUs are too expensive to leave idle.
By zeristor 2025-09-038:15 Indeed, the biggest constraint being I imagine the grid connection.
One thing I keep thinking is that with the grid being a network, there are certain key points in the network which would be extremely useful to have battery storage.
Overall the system may have peaks and troughs, however it is a network of edges, some my reach capacity for several hours a day, if battery storage could be built at these points, then the other edges could still be served.
Indeed some points may go up and down several times in a day, and a large enough battery to sate that demand could earn a lot.
I can't see the high level prices reflect the intricacies of a working network. It might be useful on the edges when power is brought in, but further in where use and demand are intertwined something more sophisticated would be needed.
I keep thinking there should be a good case for a simulator game so that people can understand how this really works. (Caveat the above is my chopped liver sliding down a wall version of it, I don't work in the industry and as a physics graduate I'm no doubt buoyed by an inherent arrogance of it being easier than it is.)
Normally if I have an idea, I find that someone has already done something already.
Are there any electricity network simulator games out there already?
By Dr4kn 2025-09-025:56 electricity peaks are probably reduced over time by hourly electricity prices. If a lot of people can save money by using electricity at cheaper hours the peak demand is reduced.
Plugging in your EV might charge to 40% immediately. When it charges to 80% doesn't matter if it has that charge in the morning. So it probably charges somewhere in the night.
Starting your dishwasher, washing machine dryer on a timer before you go to work, so it runs when energy is cheaper.
This doesn't eliminate the need for storage, but reduces its need.
By AnotherGoodName 2025-09-0115:492 reply Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
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...
By curtisblaine 2025-09-0118:132 reply > There's really nothing but positives from grid scale batteries
I'm pretty sure they have a matching number of positives and negatives.
By dkural 2025-09-0119:31 :D one would hope.
By livelaughlove69 2025-09-0119:26 Very droll
By nonfamous 2025-09-0123:10 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.
Is it 300 or 600 MWh? Or is the storage 600, but it can deliver 300MW/h?
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).
By nicoburns 2025-09-0114:51 The orginal article is pretty clear:
The 300MW Thurrock Storage project... with a total capacity of 600MWh
The OP says it the other way around though. Power is 300MW and capacity 600MWh=2h*300MW. There is no mentioning of 300MWh in the OP.
Storage is measured in MWh, power in Watts, I think the original press release is wrong and it can output 300W for at most two hours. The following link confirms that: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/08/18/statera-energy-powers-up...
By pietjepuk88 2025-09-0114:421 reply > The 300MW Thurrock Storage project, developed by Statera Energy, is now energised and delivering electricity flexibly to the network across London and the south east.
> With a total capacity of 600MWh, Thurrock Storage is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes, and can help to balance supply and demand by soaking up surplus clean electricity and discharging it instantaneously when the grid needs it.
Unless they updated the original post, that all sounds correct to me. It's a 2-hour battery, rather common in the industry.
EDIT: Ah, you mean the https://stateraenergy.co.uk/news/thurrock-energisation is wrong, with the fantastically outrageous statement of "delivering its full output of up to 600MWh within seconds."
By philipwhiuk 2025-09-0114:581 reply > "delivering its full output of up to 600MWh within seconds."
Ramp-up time for grid management is important but the value is all wrong.
The units are wrong. I don’t understand why so many people struggle with the difference beteeen MWh and MW, including people on HN.
I've even seen this with people who say they are interested in and following this tech. I don't get it. The same mistake just happens over and over.
Journalists are some of the worst offenders.
By tialaramex 2025-09-0119:361 reply Yup, this happens for any technology with journalists. A noob journo will be absolutely clear that it's crucial they interviewed Jim Smith and not Jane Smith even if it so happens that gender was not at all important to the story, like maybe Smith witnessed a massive lightning bolt destroying the bandstand.
But they will muddle bits and bytes, nanograms and milligrams, volts and amps and they barely even seem to notice that they did it.
Sometimes they insist on being incorrect.
The Guardian refuses to write the degree symbol for temperatures, for example, and have even put this error into their style guide.
By tialaramex 2025-09-0123:22 I don't want a degree symbol on my temperatures, but that's because I want them in Kelvin so they shouldn't have one.
300K is too hot and I begin sweating. The Grauniad's House Style is the least of its problems.
By nickdothutton 2025-09-0111:472 reply As an aside, this is exactly the kind of nonsense you get when marketing or PR firms have control over final wording. Once had someone change "uninterruptible power supply" to "non-interruptible" and then finally "interruptible" and that is how it went out in the final press release. There was some harsh language that day.
I could forgive un to non-, but what the hell was the logic in just removing non-? That it was like (it isn't) [in]flammable just because the 'in' isn't negating 'terruptible'?
Actually, even that doesn't make sense, you can't remove non- from non-inflammable either, that would only work if it was the 'in' removed.
By nickdothutton 2025-09-0215:27 This is a great question and was pretty much the last straw for me. I explained in plain english what the purpose of the UPS and battery room was, to help the PR understand why we called the thing "uninterruptible". Somehow in the final edit she confused this with "well, if the grid power can be interrupted and your servers remain on... then this means he must have meant 'interruptible' power supply.
By nickdothutton 2025-09-0112:101 reply We were launching a new data centre in the UK (early 90s) and wanted to crow about how much power, battery, diesel, etc we had. I don't think the PR firm had any idea what most of the words meant.
By lostlogin 2025-09-0117:37 You needed a relations management firm between you and the PR firm, turtles all the way down.
By ragebol 2025-09-0112:17 > 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)
Time to decouple the UK Electricity price from Gas so we can actually reap the benefits of this as a consumer.
By trebligdivad 2025-09-0111:211 reply 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.
Think OP is taking about UK bills which are coupled too the cost of gas for historical reasons. Which needs to change in my view too.
By tialaramex 2025-09-0120:00 They aren't per se coupled to gas. Here's roughly how it works:
We work in half hours, 48 of them per day. If you're a very large user (e.g maybe you're a factory which makes cars), or if you choose to do this at home, you can be metered in half hours and billed this way.
In advance of the half hour, we guess how much power we might need. 9pm here soon, I reckon 30GW per the British mainland. Now we run an auction. Everybody who can make power from 9pm to 9:30 bids, saying how much they'd accept to make power
Then, starting from the lowest bids, we add bidders up to 30GW of power, those people will make our 30GW of electricity, and we pay all of them the same price, that price is last bid needed to meet our 30GW goal.
This is often a closed cycle gas turbine because:
1. There are fucking shitloads of them. Probably 35GW nameplate, maybe 40GW, that is a lot of power generation. More than any other single type (Wind can deliver about 20GW to the grid, solar is smaller, nuclear is much smaller, storage also smaller even if you count it as generation which it technically is not)
2. They are (almost, maintenance is necessary) always willing to run, for a price. Rain or shine, night or day, if there is gas at any price they can charge that price plus a little profit to make it into electricity. Only question is if you'll pay
For a typical home tariff the "supplier" you're paying has guessed that on average they'll make a healthy profit if they charge you say 24p per kWh plus standing.
They pay that half-hourly price, if they guessed badly wrong and can't cover the difference they go bankrupt, which sucks for the government who are on the hook to ensure you still get electricity anyway.
So, the de-coupling would happen automatically if the current system stayed the same but you added a lot of cheap storage and enough wind power that on average the country was mostly wind powered. Or indeed nukes or solar if somehow this country built loads of nuke stations or got improbably sunnier.
By trebligdivad 2025-09-0118:021 reply Right - but if we start getting a useful amount of time when the grid doesn't need any gas, the amount of coupling should start to drop off.
By SideburnsOfDoom 2025-09-0119:591 reply Solving the engineering challenges of "useful amount of time when the grid doesn't need any gas" without also digging into why the UK's energy pricing structure is such an outlier at the expense of consumers, seem a bit like one of those doomed attempts to solve a social issue by purely technical means.
By ViewTrick1002 2025-09-028:261 reply Pretty much all of europe runs on marginal cost electricity.
The UK was just extra stupid by banning nearly all construction of onshore wind.
By SideburnsOfDoom 2025-09-038:20 While that is a slightly different cause, "banning nearly all construction of onshore wind" was and is a social issue. It's culture and politics, not engineering.
By ZeroGravitas 2025-09-0111:072 reply The only sensible way to do this I've heard is to roll out more renewables faster and so burn less gas.
Is there some other plans you support?
By SideburnsOfDoom 2025-09-0117:191 reply 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"
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?
By CorrectHorseBat 2025-09-0118:311 reply Is this not simply how markets work? Everything is sold at the marginal price.
You could change that, but it would just mean prices will be higher at another moment (in a perfect market), no?
By SideburnsOfDoom 2025-09-0119:211 reply > Is this not simply how markets work?
The UK is an outlier as noted above. So no, this is not "simply how things work" in general. It's unusual.
> it would just mean prices will be higher at another moment, no?
No, see first quoted piece of text above.
My assumption also is that it's a far from perfect market - see last paragraph.
By ZeroGravitas 2025-09-0120:041 reply The UK isn't an outlier in this regard. It's a fairly standard setup.
By SideburnsOfDoom 2025-09-0120:141 reply So you disagree with the article above, which says "Britain continues to have one of the most expensive electricity markets in the world" ?
And "Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burd..."
And "Why are Britain’s power prices the highest in the world?"
https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q4-2024/why-are-brita...
And "UK energy bills highest in Europe and public patience is wearing thin"
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-energy-bills-highest-in-europe...
"highest" means an outlier, doesn't it?
It being more expensive in Britain doesn't mean it doesn't work the same way (just come out with a lower price) elsewhere in the world.
From your electricinsights article:
> Most markets work in this way: Saudi Arabia’s oil is cheap to produce but gets a very similar price to higher-cost oil from the North Sea. The underlying economic principle is so widespread that it’s known as the Law of One Price.
By SideburnsOfDoom 2025-09-027:201 reply OK, I get it. The UK is an outlier in outcome, but not in process.
But I still think there's something very British in insisting "Why, it's all above board, we play by the same rules as everyone else of course. We just get a worse outcome than anyone else because, well ... um ... look over there! Immigrants!!" (I'm not paraphrasing you, rather the country as a whole)
British exceptionalism at its finest.
By ZeroGravitas 2025-09-029:02 If you want corruption it's much more up front. The Conservatives effectively banned onshore wind in England for a decade just after it became the cheapest source of electricity available.
Real Trump-level stupid and like Trump, the media seems to be actively diverting attention from it.
That and not installing insulation or mandating new homes to be better built cost the country billions and it got more costly when gas prices spiked.
The current govenrment can't shift costs from clean electricity to dirty gas, or to general taxation, because the media would crucify them. Meanwhile Farage is campaigning on getting rid of net zero and the NHS and they love him.
The same media starting a culture war about heat pumps at the moment. Basically if you assume the media and the political right are owned by gas and oil interests, the politics since North Sea discoveries make a lot more sense. It's like they were trying to burn as much of it as inefficiently as possible rather than use it wisely for its owners, the people.
By skippyboxedhero 2025-09-0111:093 reply Rolling out more renewables faster will mean more reliance on gas.
I am not sure how people still don't realise this after ten years of doing this and energy prices going up non-stop.
We did not start to push for renwable energy to get prices lower, this is mainly a mitigation against previously unaccounted-for externalities (CO2 emissions and air pollution).
Complaining about transition costs, to me, is like complaining that industrial waste disposal was cheaper back when we just dumped everything into the next river.
By lostlogin 2025-09-0117:40 > industrial waste disposal was cheaper back when we just dumped everything into the next river.
This is still done. Thames Water.
By nicoburns 2025-09-0114:55 Only needing gas when the renewable energy isn't available seems strictly better than needing gas 24/7
At this point, there's not that much other non-renewable generation on the UK grid, so expanding renewables will reduce the impact of gas on prices (though it'll likely be non-linear).
By spacebanana7 2025-09-0114:392 reply Gas complements renewables really well because gas can readily be tapped “on-demand” whilst renewables can only be tapped “on supply”.
It’s relatively easy to turn off gas when renewables are supplying energy to the grid at near zero cost marginal cost. But also easy to turn on gas when the renewables aren’t supplying energy, or when demand spikes in a manner uncorrelated to renewable generation.
Batteries are a more elegant solution long term, of course.
By pydry 2025-09-0116:04 Gas complements everything well. It's relatively cheap, easy to store power in large amounts and completely dispatchable. Nothing else can do all 3.
Batteries work well for short term day-to-day storage but they're impossibly expensive for seasonal storage which we will need a solution for for the last ~5-10% of decarbonization.
Probably the only way to fully decarbonize will eventually be to synthesize gas.
By SoftTalker 2025-09-0116:081 reply Gas can be used two ways: Gas in a conventional base-load steam turbine generator power plant is not easy to tap on demand. For peaking plants using gas turbine generators it is, but those are also less efficient.
By ZeroGravitas 2025-09-0117:04 The article mentions at the same site they're building a gas plant using the same tech as a large ship engines, which is an attempt to hit a sweet spot for future usage as they have high efficiency at part load.
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.
By octo888 2025-09-020:04 Precisely this!
By boredpudding 2025-09-0111:094 reply 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)
By 0rdinal 2025-09-0111:38 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)
Day ahead pricing: https://agileprices.co.uk/ National grid supply/demand and energy mix: https://grid.iamkate.com/
By rcxdude 2025-09-0111:53 Yes, but the hourly price is still largely set by gas, because it's still a minority of the time where renewables are supplying 100% of the grid.
By Havoc 2025-09-0118:02 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.
We do, but I can’t imagine it’s hugely popular. Only a few of the smaller suppliers offer it AFAIK.
By OJFord 2025-09-0121:58 Octopus is the largest UK energy supplier, and offers half-hourly billing ('Agile').
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).
By cjrp 2025-09-0116:43 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.
By stuaxo 2025-09-0117:07 Its attached to the national grid, so surely it can also charge of the grid as needed too.
