Exagen submits plans for £350m grid-scale battery

Submission of plans to Blaby District Council follows a period of public consultation and planning assessment. Further consultation with the local community is planned for the site, which Exagen said will serve as a blueprint for co-locating energy with community green spaces.

The £350m containerised battery site, which is said to be around ten times larger than most battery projects providing grid storage, will connect directly to the transmission network and will help to manage fluctuations in intermittent renewable energy.

“Nearby there are operational wind projects as well as approved solar farm and other solar farms in planning, all within a few kilometres,” said Andrew Mott, planning manager at Exagen. “Our project makes it easier for these kind of projects to connect to the grid.”

Battery management will be delivered through Exagen’s proprietary technology and AI platform. Once a site is complete, the company continuously monitors and controls the performance of its equipment and external conditions, using the output to apply machine learning across cloud platforms to optimise a site’s performance and provide a feedback loop into GIS (geographic information system) decision algorithms.