Invinity to deploy part government-funded 20.7MWh flow battery project in UK

This article requires Premium SubscriptionBasic (FREE) Subscription

Enjoy 12 months of exclusive analysis

• Regular insight and analysis of the industry’s biggest developments
• In-depth interviews with the industry’s leading figures
• Annual digital subscription to the PV Tech Power journal
• Discounts on Solar Media’s portfolio of events, in-person and virtual

Invinity has begun manufacturing the VS3 batteries that will comprise the vanadium flow battery (VFB) system at its Motherwell factory in Scotland. Construction is expected to begin in the second half of 2025. Operation is expected to begin in 2026.

The project will be installed in the South East of England and will be the first commercial battery project in the UK to co-locate a long-duration battery energy storage (LDES) system with onsite generation.

Invinity expects to co-locate the project with a solar PV array that will be developed separately by a third party.

The project is being developed as part of a demonstration competition held by DESNZ. The Longer Duration Energy Storage (LODES) competition made over £69 million of capital funding available across two competition streams.

In 2023, it was announced that Invinity had been awarded £11 million through the LODES competition. The company said today that the total project cost is expected to be up to £20 million, of which £7-10 million will be funded through DESNZ’s competition.

With full ownership and control of the project, Invinity says it will use its unrestricted access to trading and operating data from the site to fully optimise the battery to showcase its capabilities. It will also receive the ongoing revenue from the system’s grid balancing and energy trading services.

The firm discussed its move from solely being a technology provider to having part or full ownership in projects with Energy-Storage.news in May 2024 (Premium access).

See the full original version of this article on our sister site Solar Power Portal.

The UK saw 1,590MW/3,179MWh of grid-scale BESS projects approved last month, bringing the total approved projects to around 55.4GW/117GWh.

A total of 11.9GW of energy storage across all scales and technologies was installed in Europe in 2024, bringing cumulative installations to 89GW.

We hear from XL Batteries and Quino Energy, ‘organic’ chemistry flow battery technology companies, about how they plan to scale up and reduce costs to compete with lithium-ion. 

Drax has outbid Foresight Group LLP to acquire the share capital of the publicly-listed Harmony Energy Income Trust (HEIT) for £200 million (US$239.15 million).

Sumitomo Electric has followed up the US launch of its newest vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) technology, announcing a deal in Japan.