Portuguese utility EDP, through EDP Renewables (EDPR), has begun construction of its first standalone battery energy storage (BESS) asset in Europe.
The 50MW/100MWh BESS, dubbed the Harrington Franklin storage project, is located within Richborough Energy Park near Sandwich, in Kent. The two-hour duration BESS will connect to the grid at Richborough substation and is expected to be fully operational by 2025.
EDP acquired the project from British-based battery and solar developer Tupa Energy in 2023, a few months before acquiring a second UK project, a 50MW BESS located near Alness in the Highlands.
The firm is also developing a 36MW Spanish BESS. So far, its storage activity has been focused in the US, through EDPR North America, covered on our sister site, Energy-Storage.news. EDPR has nearly 200MW of contracted storage capacity in North America and over 4MW under construction in the Asia-Pacific region.
In its business plan for 2023-26, EDP said it aims to reach a storage capacity of more than 500MW worldwide. This is expected to be achieved mostly through co-located assets, with some contribution from standalone projects such as the Kent project.
Duarte Bello, CEO of Europe at EDP said: “Storage will play a pivotal role in the future of renewable energy and we at EDP are proud to be one of the players investing in this key area of the sector. The Harrington Franklin project is a clear example of both our ambition and our ability to develop storage systems that support grid flexibility and help drive Europe’s energy transition.”
EDPR’s solar and wind developments—the renewable developer has a global pipeline of wind and solar assets of over 15GW—mean it has a vested interest in storage, given the technology’s potential to enhance EDP’s intermittent generation capacity, mitigating price and profile risk.
When EDPR first acquired the Kent BESS, it said that the UK was the most advanced market in Europe for the development of battery storage assets, owing to its comprehensive regulatory framework.
While the pipeline of BESS developments in the UK is ever-increasing, developers are calling on the National Energy System Operator (NESO) to improve skip rates—the frequency with which the system operator skips over batteries to use more expensive methods in the Balancing Mechanism (BM)—claiming that skipping batteries holds back investment and drives up consumer bills.
