The search for a contractor to build a battery energy storage system in Sompting should start in November, West Sussex county councillors have been told.
Once complete, the £24m scheme, at a former waste processing site in Halewick Lane, will allow the council to take electricity from the National Grid during cheap off-peak times and return it for a much higher price when demand is at its peak.
The project has been in development for a number of years but was delayed, not least because the original contractor selected to carry out the work dropped out.
During a meeting of the Communities, Highways and Environment Scrutiny Committee, councillors discussed the progress of the scheme.
Members were told that the storage system would be linked to a substation in Worthing and would be able to charge or discharge 16MW of power and operate over a two-hour period.
The initial plan had been for 24MW of power over a one-hour period but nationwide changes made by the National Grid saw it altered.
A report to the committee said that the two-hour batteries were ‘more competitive’ than the one-hour.
The return for the public purse is expected to be 8.2%, which cabinet member Deborah Urquhart said ‘isn’t too shabby’.
She added that, as the UK moved towards local energy action plans – or micro grids – storage systems such as Halewick Lane would become all the more necessary.
Questions were asked about whether there were contingency plans in place should the scheme fall through, whether the 8.2% was a good return – some felt it was ‘relatively low’ – and whether the council had considered selling the site instead.
Nigel Dennis (Lib Dem, Horsham Hurst) and Nigel Jupp (Con, Southwater & Nuthurst) were of the opinion that given the history of the site and the state of the market, the council should ‘stop digging itself into a hole’.
But Mrs Urquhart said she didn’t believe there was any particular risk, adding: “We have every confidence in actually delivering this project.”
As well as the loss of the original contractor, world events such as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine made the situation ‘sluggish’, but Mrs Urquhart said they were now picking up.
As for selling the site, she said that, as a former landfill, there was no market interest.
On top of that, the council has already pumped £5m into the scheme, making the site safe and installing cabling.
The tendering process to look for a new contractor is expected to take five months, with construction starting once the contract is signed at the end of April 2025.
Building work should be finished by the end of 2026 with the system expected to come online on March 31 2027.
