Developer Fotowatio Renewable Ventures (FRV) has unveiled the second utility-scale battery project in its "strategic plan to develop energy storage projects globally," having closed funding and construction contracts for the 34MW / 68MWh project in West Sussex in southern England, UK.
As with its first utility-scale battery project, also in the UK, FRV is collaborating with local developer Harmony Energy on the Contego project, made up of a system of 28 Tesla Megapack lithium-ion battery systems that will use Tesla’s Autobidder AI software for real-time trading and control.
Work on the project is set to start this month near Burgess Hill in West Sussex, with the site expected to be completed in 2021, making the project one of the largest battery energy storage plants in the UK.
It comes as part of a strategic energy storage pipeline that is set to be launched globally, with the two companies having already worked together on the Holes Bay battery storage project, also in the south of England. This also utilises Tesla's Megapacks, although that one consists of six Megapack, with a total output and capacity of 7.5MW / 15MWh.
Holes Bay has been operating since June 2020, and has participated in the EPEX spot market, Firm Frequency Response (FFR) and the Balancing Mechanism (BM), being the first site to go live in National Grid ESO’s new wider access application programming interface for the BM.
