The UK government has announced nearly £7m funding to support projects that are developing advanced energy storage technologies in the country.
It is part of the Phase 1 funding, worth a total of £68m, to be awarded to twenty-four projects in the UK, through the Longer Duration Energy Storage (LODES) competition.
The projects are expected to receive a share of £6.7m to develop new energy storage technologies that leverage heat, electricity or hydrogen as stored energy.
UK government said that the projects have been selected based on their potential to improve the performance and reduce the cost of meeting net zero.
UK Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Hands said: “Driving forward energy storage technologies will be vital in our transition towards cheap, clean and secure renewable energy.
“It will allow us to extract the full benefit from our home-grown renewable energy sources, drive down costs and end our reliance on volatile and expensive fossil fuels.
“Through this competition we are making sure the country’s most innovative scientists and thinkers have our backing to make this ambition a reality.”
Part of the government’s £1bn Net Zero Innovation Portfolio, the Phase 1 funding will be followed by a Phase 2 funding of £68m, awarded to most promising Phase 1 projects.
Projects that are successful through Phase 1 funding can benefit from the second phase of the competition, which would support their commercialisation, and create new jobs.
Under the latest funding, Sunamp’s EXTEND project will receive £149,893, and Cheesecake Energy’s FlexiTanker project will get £139,411 funding.
In addition, B9 Energy Storage’s Ballylumford Power-to-X project would also benefit from £986,082 funding to mobilise 20MW Power-to-X project at Ballylumford.
The UK government said that the new funding will support the development of energy storage technologies in the country.
Sunamp chief executive officer Andrew Bissell said: “For the past decade, we have focused on decarbonising hot water and have delivered a world-beating 20,000 heat batteries using our phase change material into the market so far, and we are now bringing forward our Central Bank products for heat.
“Our thermal storage technology can be combined with heat pumps to deliver more than twice as much heat per unit of electricity on demand than direct electric heating.
“This funding will accelerate how we can further enhance thermal storage duration, working with wind energy from the grid and solar PV in homes, to provide heat and water during extended intervals of low renewables generation when green power is not available on the grid, eventually reducing the overall cost of operation to be lower than gas.”
