Drax Group has moved to strengthen its position in the UK’s energy storage market with a £157.2 million deal to acquire three battery energy storage system (BESS) projects from Apatura.
Once commissioned, the combined capacity of 260MW will expand Drax’s flexible generation portfolio, offering critical short-duration storage to support a renewables-heavy grid increasingly vulnerable to intermittency.
The projects, located in Marfleet (Hull), Neilston (East Renfrewshire), and East Kilbride (Lanarkshire), mark Drax’s first investment in short-duration storage under its FlexGen strategy. Both Marfleet and Neilston sites have secured planning permission, while East Kilbride remains pending approval. The staged acquisition payments, spread between 2025 and 2028, tie directly to project delivery milestones, ensuring capital discipline as Drax ramps up its battery storage ambitions.
Drax’s move comes as the UK grapples with a critical energy balancing challenge. With renewables now accounting for roughly 40% of total electricity generation, the need for dispatchable capacity to stabilize the grid is intensifying. Battery storage offers a solution to the temporal mismatch between renewable generation and demand, particularly as the National Grid ESO projects that up to 30GW of storage will be required by 2030 to maintain system resilience.
CEO Will Gardiner described the acquisition as “a first step in our short-duration storage investment,” positioning it as a complement to Drax’s existing mix of flexible generation, long-duration storage, and biomass-based renewable capacity. When fully integrated, Drax expects to deliver 4.4GW of dispatchable generation—a key buffer against renewable volatility.
The partnership structure with Apatura highlights an increasingly common model in the UK energy transition: developers managing construction and taking on development risk, while larger operators like Drax provide financial backing and long-term operational control. Apatura will oversee development and assume the bulk of construction risk, while Drax maintains the right of first offer on eight additional BESS projects totaling 289MW, extending the potential scale of its investment pipeline.
Construction on the initial sites is slated for 2026, with the first operational project expected in Scotland by 2027. While timelines are ambitious, they align with government policy to accelerate grid-scale storage capacity to balance growing offshore wind and solar installations.
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