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Planning consent for UK’s first new underground pumped storage hydro plant in nearly three decades
2/8/2023
News
The Scottish government has given development consent for a new 600 MW underground pumped storage hydro plant in Argyll, Scotland. It will be the first to be constructed in the UK since 1984.
To be built adjacent to Drax Group’s existing 440 MW ‘Hollow Mountain’ Cruachan underground facility, the new plant will more than double the site’s total generation capacity to over 1 GW. ‘With the right support from UK government’, the new plant could be operational as soon as 2023, reports Drax, adding that it ‘will help strengthen UK energy security with flexible generation while enabling more wind and solar power to come online in the next decade’.
Pumped storage plants act like giant water batteries by using reversible turbines to pump water from a lower reservoir to an upper reservoir which stores excess power from sources such as wind farms when supply outstrips demand. These same turbines are then reversed to bring the stored water back through the plant to generate power when the country needs it.
The new 600 MW plant at Cruachan is part of a wider £7bn strategic investment plan by Drax in clean energy technologies between 2024 and 2030, such as long duration storage and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
Commenting on the approval, Will Gardiner, Drax Group CEO, says: ‘This is a major milestone in Drax’s plans to build Britain’s first new pumped storage hydro plant in a generation. These plants play a critical role in stabilising the electricity system, helping to balance supply and demand through storing excess power from the national grid. When Scotland’s wind turbines are generating more power than we need, Cruachan steps in to store the renewable electricity so it doesn’t go to waste. With the right support from the UK government, Drax will invest ~£500mn to more than double Cruachan’s generating capacity and support almost 1,000 jobs across the supply chain during construction.’
However, the expansion of Cruachan requires an ‘updated financial stabilisation mechanism from the UK government’, according to Drax, which reports that: ‘The current absence of a framework for large-scale, long-duration storage technologies has resulted in no new plants being constructed in the UK since 1984, despite their critical role in the decarbonisation process.’
Visiting the Cruachan power station on the shores of Loch Awe, Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf echoed this sentiment, calling on the UK government to ‘provide an appropriate market mechanism for hydro power and other long duration energy storage technologies’.
