Gresham House's Glassenbury battery storage asset. Image: Gresham House Energy Storage Fund.
Gresham House Energy Storage Fund has added a further 35MW to its portfolio with the acquisition of Tynemouth and the completion of its Glassenbury B extension.
The 25MW battery-only Tynemouth site – which is connected to the distribution network – was commissioned in 2018 and generates availability-based contracted revenues from Enhanced Frequency Response services provided to National Grid.
It was acquired from Enel Global Thermal Generation and comes off the back of other recent acquisitions of the 50MW Wickham and also 50MW Thurcroft batteries, costing £32.75 million and £32.5 million respectively.
The acquisition of Tynemouth is being announced alongside the completion of construction of the 10MW expansion to Glassenbury in Kent, which was announced in February 2020 and is expected to be commissioned by 31 January 2021. Following this, the total operational capacity of Gresham House’s investment portfolio will sit at 350MW across 13 projects. This will increase again once the acquisition of the 30MW Byers Brae project in Scotland is completed.
In November, Gresham House outlined plans to “significantly increase” its portfolio with the launch of a new share issuance programme to take place over the following 12 months. The first tranche of this programme - launched 10 November - included an initial placing and initial offer for subscription, with the funding to go towards a new pipeline of up to c.485MW split between ten energy storage projects with a total consideration of around £200 million.
Ben Guest, fund manager of Gresham House Energy Storage Fund, pointed to recent wholesale power price short term spikes - with prices in the Nord Pool N2EX auction hitting £1,000.04/MWh last week, the highest hourly price seen on the auction - highlighting the "urgent need for more energy storage capacity in the UK".
He added that the company is "moving swiftly to deploy the £120 million we raised in November into our near-term pipeline and look forward to updating shareholders on our continued progress".
Solar Power Portal publisher Solar Media will be hosting the Energy Storage Summit 2021 in an exciting new format on 23-24 February and again on 3-4 March. See the website for more details.