From coal power station to battery storage

Tilbury A and B were twin coal-burning power stations in Essex, built next to the river Thames so that coal could be brought in by barge. For decades they served electricity to nearby London, before they were decommisioned. There was a brief attempt to convert one of them to run on biomass, an aborted ‘clean coal’ proposal, and then they were demolished in 2017.

The plants have gone, along with the rest of the UK’s coal power, but something useful was left behind on site. All power stations have high capacity grid connections. The substation and cabling that served Tilbury has now been repurposed for an energy storage project.

Statera’s Thurrock Storage Battery was recently connected to the grid, and in doing so became the largest energy storage facility in the country. It will store 300MW of energy, enough to power 68,000 homes for two hours, and can ramp up to full power in seconds.

Like the coal plants before it, the battery will serve London, helping to balance the grid. It’s not all clean energy – there’s a new gas plant nearby too – but it’s part of a wider flexible power system that will help to integrate the intermittent solar and wind power sources in the area.

There’s something rather satisfying about using the legacy infrastructure of fossil fuels to enable the clean energy transition. It’s not the only example of that either, from tapping old coal mines for heat, to using gas supply lines in reverse for carbon capture and storage, or offshore oil and gas platforms becoming hubs for wind farms.

Labour can be similarly repurposed, using transferable skills from the fossil fuel industry to serve clean tech. This is an important part of a just transition, and ensures that we don’t make an entire workforce obsolete. Whole companies can make the switch too: Danish Oil and Gas rebranded to Orsted because they didn’t have any gas or oil anymore, cutting their emissions by 98% in the process.

In other words, it’s a trend. We need to stop burning stuff, but the infrastructure of fossil fuels can give us a good headstart on building something better.