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Visit to Highview Power Storage

A group of members from the EI's London and Home Counties branch visited Highview Power Storage on the Slough Trading Estate earlier this year.

Greeted by Stuart Nelmes, the Site and Engineering Manager, visitors were introduced to Gareth Brett, CEO, who gave a presentation outlining the history and development of the company.

Highview Power Storage is an UK company founded in 2002 and has developed and built a pilot plant of a novel energy storage system which uses liquid air as a storage medium. Critically, the system can be scaled to 100MWs/GWhs of storage, similar to medium scale pumped hydro. Liquid air can easily be stored in the same low pressure tanks as used by the LNG industry – it is hundreds of times more energy dense than water (therefore taking up far less space) and the process does not need large mountains or lakes.

Highview’s fully operational pilot plant, which was part funded by a £1.1m grant from the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, is connected to the grid and complies with all the regulations and inspections, just like any other commercial generator. The system has more than 150 hours of operational time which is equivalent to two years of UK STOR usage demand. The plant is currently being operated for seasonal TRIAD management (a UK specific low load factor peaking service). Collaboration partners for the project were University of Leeds, Scottish & Southern Energy, and BOC/Linde.






















Following the talk, members were kitted out with safety helmets, jackets and goggles and shown the plant. The operation of each area was explained and a member of site staff demonstrated the computerised control and system monitoring and brought the plant into operation.

A question and answer session with refreshments completed a most interesting day.
 

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