Power Technology

Daily Newsletter

07 August 2023

Daily Newsletter

Octopus Renewables to invest £2m in solar and battery storage

The announcement comes amid calls for greater energy storage capacity in the UK.

Renewables investment company Octopus Renewables Infrastructure Trust (ORIT) has announced an investment of up to £2m ($2.5m) to establish a new UK development focused on solar and battery storage.

The development has an initial target of more than 350MW of projects including ground-mounted solar and co-located battery storage, which will be developed by BLC Energy.

“Investing in the early stages of creating new renewable energy projects brings huge growth opportunities for ORIT, both from value creation through successfully delivering projects, and from the exclusive opportunity to invest into the construction of the sites once they are ready to build,” said Phil Austin, chairman of ORIT, in a statement published last week.

ORIT said that land rights and grid connections for the project were “expected to be secured”, although it did not specify where exactly in the UK the project will be developed.

ORIT is the investment arm of Octopus Renewables, which in turn is a part of British renewable energy company Octopus Energy. The UK-based company is a major utility and powers more than five million UK homes and businesses.

Octopus Energy has made a number of major renewable investments in recent months. In July, the company announced plans to invest £15bn into global offshore wind by 2030. Two months earlier, in May, the company announced an agreement with United Arab Emirates-based company Masdar for the development of UK battery storage.

The UK Government has a target to quintuple its solar capacity to 70GW by 2035 from its current level of 14GW.

According to a report, the UK’s National Grid will need to have more than 50GW of energy storage by 2050 to meet its net-zero targets. At the end of 2021, the UK had 25.8 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of pumped hydro storage and 1.65GWh of battery storage.

A number of UK officials have sounded the alarm over the impacts of a lack of energy storage. In May, Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf, called on the UK government to deploy more “large-scale, long-duration energy storage”, including pumped hydro storage where water is allowed to flow between two reservoirs as and when power is needed.

ESG 2.0 marks a shift towards stricter environmental rules

ESG is moving into a different era, which we call ESG 2.0. While ESG 1.0 was driven by voluntary corporate action, spurred by pressure from activist consumers and investors, ESG 2.0 is being driven by a new wave of government policies. The EU has taken the regulatory lead, with rules introduced or in the pipeline that will price emissions, regulate the use of the terms ‘ESG’ and ‘sustainability’ in marketing materials, and make ESG reporting mandatory. The US has taken a different approach, favoring less regulation and more financial support in the form of tax breaks for clean industry (renewables plus nuclear and hydrogen). China is planning to expand its emissions trading system to more sectors, decarbonize its heavy industry, and ramp up its use of renewables. The new policy direction is mainly motivated by the ambition to hit net zero emissions targets. But on top of this, governments are now competing for clean industry and trying to challenge China’s leadership on the production of the world’s green technologies such as solar panels and batteries, as well as the production and refinement of materials needed for energy transition such as lithium. These driving forces are leading to policy that will impact every sector, not just heavy industry, and will keep ESG near the top of the regulatory agenda over the longer term.