Banks to invest £100m in Scottish battery storage project

Banks Renewables has said it will invest more than £100 million into developing Pond Energy Park, which will include a 200MW battery storage project to be located on the site of an industrial park near Bathgate in Scotland.

An application for Pond Battery Storage is expected to be submitted for planning permission later this year. The project, on a two-hectare site, will have an export capacity of 200MW over two hours. When fully charged, this project will be able to supply the average demands of 600,000 homes for a two-hour period, more homes than Edinburgh and Glasgow combined.

The planned site is on Pond Industrial Estate on Whitburn Road to the south-east of Bathgate.

The new site will provide opportunities for local businesses in areas like construction, groundworks and remediation. Banks said its ‘Connect2Renewables’ initiative prioritises local businesses “as much as possible” when awarding contracts on its sites.

Gordon Thomson, projects director at Banks Renewables said: “The proposed Pond Battery Storage project in West Lothian marks a very exciting time for us here at Banks Renewables. Battery storage projects like this are becoming increasingly important in Scotland’s push for net zero. When it’s not sunny or windy, battery energy storage can allow us to dip into the reserves by using pre-generated energy in the batteries to supply to the national grid and reducing our reliance on energy derived from imported fossil fuels.”