Gresham House Energy Storage Fund (LSE:GRID), the UK’s largest listed fund investing in utility-scale battery energy storage systems, agreed the conditional acquisition of the Rayleigh project under an SPA.
The addition lifts GRID's new pipeline from 694MW under its Three-year Plan to 1,174MW and, once built, would be almost five times the size of its largest operational asset, Melksham (100MW), and twice the size of the two largest pipeline projects (each 240MW).
Management says the project’s scale should deliver economies of scale and that its southern England location is expected to attract negative Transmission Network Use of System (TNUoS) charges for at least the first few years of operation.
The project is also positioned to complement more than 6GW of new intermittent offshore wind awarded in the February 2026 CfD round for the East coast.
Completion is conditional on receipt of an acceptable 'Gate 2' connection offer from the National Energy System Operator, expected between September and January 2027.
"Rayleigh is an exciting project for GRID in terms of its sheer size, strategic location and, of course, potential investment returns and positive expected impact on the Company's NAV per share," said Ben Guest.
GRID says it has flexibility to build Rayleigh to a minimum two-hour duration or longer and will discuss the transaction at its Capital Markets webinar on 28 May.
