UK firm Granted £912,000 to use Gravity to Store Energy at Brownfield site

Budget reactions

The UK government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has granted around £912,000 in funding to London-based Gravitricity, whose patented technology uses gravity to store energy, to enable the company to set up an energy storage project in Northern England.

The ‘GraviSTORE’ project is one of the five successful projects chosen under the Longer Duration Energy Storage Demonstration Programme, Stream 1 Phase 1, by the UK government.

Stream 1 aims to accelerate the commercialisation of innovative longer duration energy storage projects through actual demonstrations. During Phase 1, projects will be expected to mobilise their proposed technologies to prepare for potential deployment on the UK energy system, said BEIS.

The department has notified that Gravitricity Limited will receive £912,410.84 to design their multiweight energy store demonstrator project, which will store and discharge energy by lifting and lowering multiple weights in a vertical underground shaft.

The concept behind the energy storage system was developed by company founder and Technical Director Peter Fraenkel MBE, a chartered mechanical engineer currently serving as a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh. After securing early grant funding around 2012 to further develop its technology, the company received £650,000 from Innovate UK some 4-5 years later to design and build their concept demonstrator.

Working closely with Dutch winch and offshore manufacturer Huisman Equipment during 2021, Gravitricity constructed, commissioned, and operated a 250kW, grid-connected demonstration project using a 15 metre high rig at the Port of Leith, Edinburgh, last year.

The Gravitricity system uses weight configurations totalling up to 12,000 tonnes in a deep shaft, suspended by a number of cables, each of which is engaged with an electric winch capable of lifting its share of the weight. Electricity is stored in the form of potential energy by raising the weights.

Power is then generated by lowering the weights to turn a generator. “The technology has been proven to reach full power in less than one second and has a predicted full scale efficiency of between 80% and 90%,” claims the company.

The firm is now developing an industrial consortium to take its technology to market, and plans to commence the development of its first full-scale project at a mine site in mainland Europe this year.

Recently, Gravitricity has been investigating opportunities for purpose-built prototype shafts at brownfield locations in the UK, where gravity storage will be combined with hydrogen and inter-seasonal heat storage. For this purpose, the firm has now won the £912,000 grant from BEIS.

According to Gravitricity, its technology has the following unique characteristics:

• 50-year design life with no cycle limit or degradation
• Response time: zero to full power in less than one second
• Efficiency: between 80 and 90 percent
• Versatile: can run slowly at low power or fast at high power
• Easy to construct near networks
• Cost effective: levelised costs well below lithium batteries