Politico Interview: Highview Power CEO Richard Butland Outlines Vision for UK’s Clean Energy Future with Liquid Air Storage

As the UK aims to meet its ambitious clean power targets by 2030, energy storage emerges as a critical element in the nation’s bid to decarbonise its grid. Richard Butland, CEO of Highview Power, has shared key insights with Politico’s Morning Energy and Climate UK newsletter (MEMEC) highlighting liquid air technology as a vital component of the UK’s clean energy infrastructure.

Below is the interview Politico published:

Clean Power 2030

BATTLE-READY: Energy storage is the next “battleground” in the government’s bid to clean the U.K. grid by 2030, an industry leader says.
Liquidity: Liquid air storage provider Highview Power has some good news for the government — and, as the budget looms, a request for ministers to get a move on with big decisions.

The deets: Highview boss Richard Butland told MECUK last week that it plans to build four 2.5-gigawatt-hour power plants in the U.K. by 2030. He says they’ll help deliver 10 percent of the country’s long-duration energy storage (LDES) targets.

Liquid… air? This is not science fiction pseudo-tech or a zany coal-powered vehicle from ’70s Blue Peter. It is where excess renewable energy is used to compress and cryogenically liquify air at minus-200C. This is stored then reheated to meet demand and used to power turbines, turning the energy back into electricity.

Highview has selected… Carrington in Manchester for its first plant, with another planned in England and two in Scotland. Each plant will be able to power 650,000 homes for more than 12 hours, Butland said.

Policy corner: DESNZ officials will note cheerfully, one imagines, that the move comes after ministers announced plans for a cap and floor system to back LDES schemes, essentially guaranteeing their future revenues.

Useful friends: The company is 22 percent owned by the taxpayer-backed National Wealth Fund. Other big-name backers include Centrica, Rio Tinto, and Goldman Sachs.

STORAGE SOLUTIONS: The government is on “the right trajectory” with its clean power goals, Butland said. But the storage chief thinks one missing link — let us shock you — is storage.

Quote: “Storage is critical, and it’s the next battleground, right? Because fundamentally, I think we’ve committed to the generation, and with AR6 [Contracts for Difference allocation round six] we’re getting a very significant amount of further projects,” he said.

Decision time: But “decisions needed to be made quite quickly” by the government if it is to hit its big green goals, Butland added, even as he talked up “great alignment between government, DESNZ, NESO, and Ofgem.” He argued: “I think that the next challenge will be moving that into execution. And as you know, execution is always a little harder.”

SKIP TIP: Butland was sympathetic to challenges with the so-called “skip rate” — how often NESO skips over battery storage to rely on gas at times of high demand. This is primarily a “software challenge,” he said, adding: “Trying to deal with lots of very small assets is quite tough. And so that’s something they’ve got to work through with software and everything else, and we need all of it to work well.”

HI, AI: He also revealed Highview is looking at whether to “co-locate data centers so we can all run AI on clean energy.” Butland said: “If [we] want to use Chat GPT… we need clean energy to be investing in data.”