The UK’s policy frameworks have helped to unlock an opportunity in cryogenic gas that will lead to the gradual phase-out of gas-fired power plants in the UK in the decades ahead – and other countries could follow suit.
This is the headline message from Richard Butland CEO of green-energy innovator Highview Power, in a recent interview with gasworld.
“Policy is critical,” said Butland. “The right [policy] frameworks unlock everything as [they] give us access to the cheapest capital on the best terms [by] providing certainty [to projects].”
Butland also made the follow-up point that providing certainty is not the same as providing a subsidy.
“There have been some research and development grants we have secured down the years, but we don’t expect government handouts. These are 50-year investments we are making – and the right policy framework means we can secure capital at 6%, say, rather than 12% or more. That is critical.”
Highview’s business model is to fund and own the assets it builds, in the knowledge that the power its technology supplies has long-term payment guarantees that attach which make the whole opportunity stack up financially. This is what the UK’s policy set-up has delivered, enabling Highview to move ahead with confidence.
The background to Highview Power’sinvestment
As the energy transition builds, and renewable energy grows in the mix, the question of how to store electricity most effectively for grid flexibility has been climbing the agenda.
Gas-fired power plants are the most common fast-response option of choice today, increasingly allied to lithium-ion batteries to manage short-duration balancing challenges.
But it is well understood that another piece in the puzzle is needed in the form of low-carbon long-duration energy storage. This means large stores of low- or zero-carbon energy that can be accessed and used from four to up to 20 hours at a time, and sometimes even longer.
One of the leading moves in this space is a cryogenic technology that delivers precisely such long-duration storage – the use of liquid air to deliver stored energy.
On an international stage, the first mover on this opportunity today is the UK company Highview Power. And more than a decade on from proving its technology with a small-scale pilot project near London, a first commercial-scale plant is now taking shape, to be followed by four much larger plants by 2030, with two to be built in Scotland and two in England.
Each of the four larger planned UK facilities is a 2.5GWh plant and due to come onstream by 2030, but before that Highview will deliver a smaller project at Carrington near Manchester, in north-west England.
“Though smaller than what will follow, this one is very important because it is our first full-scale commercial plant,” says Highview Power CEO Richard Butler.
The plant encompasses compression, liquefaction, and storage of air, ready for regasification and being put through a steam turbine to make electricity.
The Carrington plant should be ready to switch on in the first quarter of 2026 and will serve as an important test-case for Highview.
Read the and in the June issue of gasworld Global magazine.
