Market

Santander UK has provided debt finance for two battery storage projects in a single week, a 42.7 million pound facility for Econergy's 80MW Immingham site and a senior debt facility for Brockwell Energy's 60MW Inchbean Farm project in Scotland

Econergy's Immingham battery has locked in two 10-year revenue agreements with EDF Energy worth an estimated 45-50 million pounds, about half its projected lifetime revenue, before the site has even finished construction. Brockwell's Scottish project reached financial close in May with Fluence handling the build.

9 August 2026 · Source: Solar Power Portal

Two separate banks-backing-batteries stories landing in the same week from the same lender is less a coincidence than a signal about where UK grid-storage financing has settled. Econergy's 80MW/240MWh Immingham site got a 38.4 million pound main facility plus VAT and reserve financing, while Brockwell's 60MW/120MWh Inchbean Farm project in East Ayrshire got a senior debt facility on the back of its May financial close. Different developers, different technology partners, same bank, same underlying pattern, battery storage has moved from a speculative asset class to one mainstream lenders will underwrite on fairly standard project-finance terms.

The Econergy revenue structure is the more interesting half of this story for anyone trying to understand how battery projects actually get paid. Two 10-year agreements with EDF Energy Customers, split into 40MW loads each, come with a guaranteed annual revenue floor plus a revenue-sharing mechanism on top, and together they're expected to cover roughly half the site's total projected revenue over the contract term. That's the battery-storage equivalent of a solar farm signing a long power purchase agreement before construction finishes, it de-risks the project enough for a bank to lend against it, while leaving the other half of the revenue exposed to wholesale and balancing-market prices where the real upside sits.

Brockwell's Fluence-built Smartstack installation is a smaller story on its own, but it fits a pattern this site has tracked before with Push Power's Kentishes approval in Essex, solar-plus-storage and standalone-storage projects clearing planning and reaching financial close at a steady clip across different parts of the country, all competing for grid connections from the same overstretched network operators. Neither Immingham nor Inchbean Farm are solar sites, they're pure battery, but pure-battery projects sit on the same connection queues as the solar-plus-storage schemes that do include panels, and every megawatt of new storage capacity reaching financial close adds to that queue pressure regardless of whether panels are attached.

For a homeowner in Sandwich this has no direct action attached to it, these are utility-scale projects a domestic installer never touches. What it does confirm is that the battery side of the UK's solar-plus-storage build-out has genuine institutional lending behind it now, not just developer equity and government schemes, which is the kind of financing depth that tends to mean more projects get built rather than fewer stall at the planning stage. Whether that translates into faster domestic grid connections in the South East depends less on how many batteries get financed and more on whether Ofgem's connection reforms, covered in earlier briefings, actually clear the queue these projects are adding to.

Read the original: Solar Power Portal. Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.

Get a solar quote See MCS installations