Charging Forward: Moray Council approves RES battery storage project, major BESS plans at Teesworks and Energy Dome signs CO2 battery offtake agreement

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Charging Forward: Moray Council approves RES battery storage project, major BESS plans at Teesworks and Energy Dome signs CO2 battery offtake agreement

In this week’s Charging Forward, Moray Council has approved a 50 MW battery energy storage system (BESS) in Scotland, developers submit plans for major battery projects at Teesworks and Italian firm Energy Dome secures an offtake agreement for its pioneering CO2 battery in Sardinia. This week’s headlines: Moray Council approves 50 MW BESS Plans submitted […]

In this week’s Charging Forward, Moray Council has approved a 50 MW battery energy storage system (BESS) in Scotland, developers submit plans for major battery projects at Teesworks and Italian firm Energy Dome secures an offtake agreement for its pioneering CO2 battery in Sardinia.

This week’s headlines:

Moray Council approves 50 MW BESS
Plans submitted for £62m BESS in Teesside
NatPower UK plans 1 GW Teesside BESS
Boralex takes stake in Scottish wind and battery project
Rashley New Energy plans 100 MW BESS in Ardrossan
Council rejects Statera plans for 500 MW BESS
Energi Generation to appeal 100 MW BESS refusal
Engie signs offtake agreement with Energy Dome
ABB buys Siemens Gamesa business unit

Moray Council approves 50 MW BESS

Moray Council has approved the construction of a Scottish BESS project from renewable energy developer RES Group.

The company plans to build the 49.9 MW Corshellach Energy Storage System on land adjacent to the Berryburn substation near Dunphail in Moray.

RES said it selected the site as there is minimal requirement for additional infrastructure to connect to the wider grid network.

RES development manager Milo Amsbury-Savage said battery storage will be “crucial” in supporting Scotland’s net zero emissions targets.

“Battery energy storage also has a key role in cost-effectively decarbonising the power sector,” Amsbury-Savage said.

“As well as maximising the output of variable generation, short-duration flexibility offered by technologies such as battery energy storage, could reduce energy system costs by up to £10bn per year by 2050 through minimising the need for new peaking generation, such as expensive gas, and network assets.”

Across the UK and Ireland, RES has already developed more than 830 MW of energy storage projects, managing nearly 600 MW of operational projects from its control centre in Glasgow.

Plans submitted for £62m BESS in Teesside

Battery storage developer Energy Optimisation Solutions (EOS) has submitted plans for a £62m Teesside BESS project to Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council.

Located at the Teesworks freeport north of Middlesbrough, the 100 MW project is set to support more than 100 jobs according to the developers.

EOS director Peter Walker said the company is hopeful its plans will be approved.

“With so much renewable energy development planned for the site, such a supportive environment and such an experienced team in charge, it makes for the ideal location for our next battery storage facility,” Walker said.

The Teesworks industrial zone on Teesside.

“If we as a country are going to hit our net zero ambitions then energy storage is absolutely essential.

“You can store water in reservoirs and gas in gasometers and in LPG form so you can use those resources when you need them.

“Battery storage systems mean that you can do the same thing with electricity generated from renewable sources.”

Teesworks chairman Chris Musgrave said: “Battery energy storage is another key piece in the clean energy mix at Teesworks, helping to ensure that energy needs can be met from renewable sources regardless of weather conditions.

“We look forward to working with the team at EOS on this project if the proposals are approved.”

The planned site for the BESS adjoins two BP hydrogen projects – HyGreen Teesside and the H2 Teesside.

NEP's CCS project in Teesside. — The Northern Endurance Project involves creating a carbon capture and storage network in Teesside.

HyGreen Teesside is set to be one of the largest green hydrogen production facilities in the UK when it begins operations in 2026, producing an initial 80 MWe of capacity.

Meanwhile, the H2 Teesside project is set to be one of the UK’s largest blue hydrogen production sites targeting 1.2 GW of production.

BP is also developing the Net Zero Teesside (NZT) project nearby in a joint venture with Norwegian firm Equinor.

NZT includes plans for one of the world’s first commercial scale gas-fired power stations with carbon capture and storage. The project will also decarbonise nearby industrial facilities by storing captured CO2 in depleted fields in the North Sea.

If the Teesside BESS project gains approval, EOS expects construction to take 12 months to complete.

NatPower UK plans 1 GW BESS at Teesside

Meanwhile, renewable energy developer NatPower UK has also submitted proposals for a 1 GW Teesside BESS project to Redcar and Cleveland council.

Located on a 50 acre section of the Long Acre site at Teesworks, the BESS could store enough power for around 3.9 million homes for up to four hours.

If approved, the Teesworks Gigapark would be one of the largest battery storage projects in the UK and support up to 300 jobs during the construction period.

NatPower UK managing director John Sturman said the project will make a “significant contribution to establishing Teesside as the UK’s clean energy capital”.

Sturman said the project represents “real opportunity” for the local community, with up to £1m contributed each year to support local sustainability initiatives.

“Our goal is to leave a lasting, positive legacy—investing in the local community while delivering transformative change on a national scale,” Sturman said.

Boralex takes stake in Scottish wind and battery project

Boralex has formed a joint venture for the development, construction and operation of the proposed 145 MW Clashindarroch II wind farm extension and adjacent 50 MW battery.

The Canadian firm has been developing the project, located near Dufftown in Moray, for several year on behalf of Clashindarroch Wind Farm Extension Ltd.

It comes after Boralex secured its first planning consent for a BESS project in the UK earlier this month for its 49.9 MW Loch Toftingall development in Caithness, Scotland.

Vattenfall operates the original Clashindarroch wind farm, which consists of 18 onshore turbines near Huntly in Aberdeenshire.

Clashindarroch Wind Farm, Aberdeenshire. Image: Vattenfall

The Swedish firm received is also developing the separate 77 MW Clashindarroch II wind farm.

Vattenfall secured confirmation of its planning consent for the project in November after a judicial review.

Environmental activists had challenged the Scottish government’s original approval decision over the wind farm’s potential impact to Scottish wildcat populations.

Rashley New Energy plans BESS in Ardrossan

Battery storage developer Rashley New Energy (RNE) has lodged plans for a 100 MW BESS project near the North Ayrshire town of Ardrossan in Scotland.

According to planning documents, RNE aims to begin work at the site in the second half of 2028, with the company targeting a grid connection by 2029.

RNE is a subsidiary of Warrington-headquartered New Energy Partnership, which is developing a 1 GW pipeline of projects including a 500 MW BESS near Ayr.

Council rejects Statera plans for 500 MW BESS

A Buckinghamshire Council committee has voted against approving Statera Energy’s plans for a 500 MW BESS facility near Granborough.

The council’s strategic sites committee voted to reject the plans by a 7-2 majority on the grounds they would harm the landscape and its character.

At the meeting, Conservative committee chairman Alan Turner said the project was a “business opportunity rather than providing any green energy”.

The council also received hundreds of objections from local residents over the BESS proposals.

Statera Energy is also developing long duration energy projects such as the Loch Kemp pumped storage hydro project in Scotland.

Residents raised concerns about the potential risk of fires and explosions, however a spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) told the BBC that such incidents were “extremely rare in the UK”.

“Every battery storage facility we construct helps protect families from future energy shocks,” the spokesperson added.

Statera told the BBC it was “disappointed” by the decision and would consider its next steps.

A Statera spokesperson said: “We are disappointed by the council members’ decision to refuse the application, especially given the positive recommendations from its officers.”

Energi Generation to appeal 100 MW BESS refusal

Battery storage developer Energi Generation will appeal a Burnley Council decision to refuse planning permission for a BESS project in Lancashire.

Energi Generation planned to build the 100 MW BESS on land formerly used as an open-cast coal mine.

The council’s development control committee rejected the proposals due to concerns about the potential impact to the rural landscape at the site near Padiham.

In response to this month’s decision, a spokesperson for Lancashire-based Energi Generation said the company will appeal the decision.

The spokesperson said the company is “extremely disappointed” with the refusal of its planning application and scorned what the firm believes was the local authority’s “inadequate communication”.

“The council have ignored the substantial benefits of this scheme and have demonstrated a troubling pattern of limited cooperation and inadequate communication throughout the process,” the spokesperson said.

“The council have also chosen to ignore Labour’s new flagship Clean Power 2030 report calling for a near five-fold increase in battery storage despite the opportunity this project offers, in particular as this project does not need to wait 10 to 13 years as many other schemes do for National Grid network upgrades before it can become operational.

“It is particularly notable no statutory consultees raised objections to the application and only nine local objections were raised which bizarrely were not shared with Energi until the council announced their intention to refuse the scheme.

“This means the reasons for refusal were based solely on the subjective conclusions of the case officers without external technical support for their stance.”

International news: Engie signs offtake agreement with CO2 battery developer

French multinational energy firm Engie has signed an offtake agreement with Italian long duration energy storage (LDES) developer Energy Dome.

The agreement covers Energy Dome’s first full-scale CO2 battery in Ottana on the Italian island of Sardinia.

The Ottana project features a 20 MW/200 MWh CO2 battery unit, which is capable of providing electricity to approximately 14,000 households over a continuous 10-hour period.

A render of Energy Dome’s planned CO2 battery facility in Italy. Image: Energy Dome

The facility is set to be one of only a few operational energy storage assets with a 10hour discharge duration under a commercial offtake agreement when it is commissioned in early 2025, Energy Dome said.

Under the agreement, Energy Dome will own and operate the CO2 battery while Engie will dispatch the stored power into the Italian market.

Energy Dome chief executive Claudio Spadacini said the agreement with Engie “confirms our deployment readiness, validates our business model, and underlines the market-leading value proposition of our technology”.

“The era of deployment has arrived, and this collaboration will undoubtedly accelerate our mission to decarbonise the world by providing sustainable, utility-scale energy storage,” Spadacini added.

The Engie deals comes shortly after Energy Dome signed its first contract in the US as part of plans to build a 20 MW CO2 battery in Wisconsin.

ABB buys Siemens Gamesa business unit

Swedish-Swiss multinational engineering firm ABB will acquire the power electronics subsidiary of Spanish-German wind engineering company Siemens Gamesa.

ABB said the acquisition of the Gamesa Electric business unit is primarily focused on electrical products for power conversion.

This includes doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) wind converters, industrial battery energy storage system (BESS) and utility-scale solar power inverters.

The power electronics business of Gamesa Electric reported 2024 revenues of around €170 million (£141m) for the fiscal year ending 30 September.

The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

ABB system drives division president Chris Poynter said the acquisition means the company will be “much better position to capitalise on the expansion of the power conversion market”.

“This targeted acquisition is in line with our commitments to grow our portfolio for high power renewable applications and support productivity in a low-carbon world,” Poynter said.

“It will expand our engineering depth for power conversion and grid connection, and will add significant opportunity to service a large installed base.”

ABB said the transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions and the company expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025.

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Flexential, a leading provider of secure and flexible data center solutions, this month announced that it has joined forces with Lonestar Data Holdings Inc. to support the upcoming launch of Freedom, Lonestar’s second lunar data center. Scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket via Intuitive Machines, this mission is a critical step toward establishing a permanent data center on the Moon. Ground-Based Support for Lunar Data Storage Flexential’s Tampa data center will serve as the mission control platform for Lonestar’s lunar operations, providing colocation, interconnection, and professional services. The facility was chosen for its proximity to Florida’s Space Coast launch operations and its ability to deliver low-latency connectivity for critical functions. Flexential operates two data centers in Tampa and four in Florida as part of its FlexAnywhere® Platform, comprising more than 40 facilities across the U.S. “Flexential’s partnership with Lonestar represents our commitment to advancing data center capabilities beyond conventional boundaries,” said Jason Carolan, Chief Innovation Officer at Flexential. “By supporting Lonestar’s space-based data center initiative, we are helping to create new possibilities for data storage and disaster recovery. This project demonstrates how innovative data center expertise can help organizations prepare for a resilient future with off-world storage solutions.” A New Era of Space-Based Resiliency The growing demand for data center capacity, with U.S. power consumption expected to double from 17 GW in 2022 to 35 GW by 2030 (according to McKinsey & Company), is driving interest in space-based solutions. Storing data off-planet reduces reliance on terrestrial resources while enhancing security against natural disasters, warfare, and cyber threats. The Freedom data center will provide resiliency, disaster recovery, and edge processing services for government and enterprise customers requiring the highest levels of data protection. The solar-powered data center leverages Solid-State Drives (SSDs) and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) edge

Why DeepSeek Is Great for AI and HPC and Maybe No Big Deal for Data Centers

In the rapid and ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), the emergence of DeepSeek’s R1 model has sent ripples across industries. DeepSeek has been the data center industry’s topic of the week, for sure. The Chinese AI app surged to the top of US app store leaderboards last weekend, sparking a global selloff in technology shares Monday morning. But while some analysts predict a transformative impact within the industry, a closer examination suggests that, for data centers at large, the furor over DeepSeek might ultimately be much ado about nothing. DeepSeek’s Breakthrough in AI and HPC DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, this month unveiled its R1 model, claiming performance on par with, or even surpassing, leading models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Remarkably, DeepSeek developed this model at a fraction of the cost typically associated with such advancements, utilizing a cluster of 256 server nodes equipped with 2,048 GPUs. This efficiency has been attributed to innovative techniques and optimized resource utilization. AI researchers have been abuzz about the performance of the DeepSeek chatbot that produces results similar to ChatGPT, but is based on open-source models and reportedly trained on older GPU chips. Some researchers are skeptical of claims about DeepSeek’s development costs and means, but its performance appears to challenge common assumptions about the computing cost of developing AI applications. This efficiency has been attributed to innovative techniques and optimized resource utilization. Market Reactions and Data Center Implications The announcement of DeepSeek’s R1 model led to significant market reactions, with notable declines in tech stocks, including a substantial drop in Nvidia’s valuation. This downturn was driven by concerns that more efficient AI models could reduce the demand for high-end hardware and, by extension, the expansive data centers that house them. For now, investors are re-assessing the

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle