Scotland now home to Europe’s largest battery storage plant

What’s claimed to be Europe’s largest battery has come to Scotland, after a new facility came online in the country’s north.

Located at a site named Blackhillock near the small town of Keith, the battery can deliver up to 200MW of electricity and can store as much as 400MWh. Charging current flows into the facility from offshore and onshore wind turbines. The previous biggest battery titleholder, a project in the English town of Pillswood, came online in late 2022 specced at 98MW/196MWh.

According to Zenobē, the firm operating Blackhillock, the facility will expand to 300MW/600MWh by 2026, at which point it will store enough energy to supply two hours of electricity to 3.1 million homes – more than exist in Scotland, or so we’re told.

Unlike Pillswood, Blackhillock eschewed Tesla products. Zenobē has purchased the tech used at the new site from Finnish firm Wärtsilä, which is providing both the batteries and the digital energy platform software to operate them.

UK energy minister Michael Shanks welcomed Blackhillock’s debut.

“Battery sites like this are helping store our clean, surplus energy to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels – which will protect households and boost our energy security for good,” he said. “We are wasting no time in delivering clean power by 2030, with the Blackhillock battery site marking the latest milestone in delivering our mission to become a clean energy superpower.”

Zenobē claims Blackhillock will somehow save folks more than £170 million over the next 15 years on their bills compared to the price of electricity generated by natural gas and will mean 2.6 million tons of CO₂ won’t be emitted over the same period.

A map Zenobē included in its announcement, see below, shows Blackhillock providing energy to the cities Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Transmission lines radiating out from the facility also reach into England.

Zenobē’s planned and active battery storage facilities in Scotland

Zenobē already operates a 50MW/100MWh battery at Wishaw near Glasgow. The company plans to develop 1.9GWh of battery storage in coming years across four more in-development or proposed Scottish facilities. It’s not clear when those projects will commence operations, but Wärtsilä is providing technology for at least one of the other projects, Kilmarnock South, near Glasgow (not too far from Wishaw).

Zenobē claims every joule those batteries store and send will be needed as its analysis of the UK’s 2030 clean energy plan leads it to believe more than 22GW of supply is needed to meet that policy’s targets.

Just 5GW of battery supply was available at the end of 2024, according to clean energy advocacy group Renewable UK.

Around 127GW of battery projects are in the pipeline, but of the 1,659 active battery storage projects in the UK only eight percent are operational or under construction. 31 percent have been approved but not fully built. The remaining 61 percent of projects comprise proposals under consideration by regulators, plus others at an even earlier stage of development.

With a little less than five years until 2030, meeting the UK’s renewable energy goal therefore won’t be easy. ®