Santander Backs Immingham BESS With £42.7m as UK Storage Finance Gathers Pace
Masdar's Rochdale BESS startup and a string of commercial-bank deals show institutional capital moving fast into UK storage ahead of the government's 27.1GWh target.
Masdar brought its 35-megawatt battery storage facility in Rochdale, England, into commercial operation on Monday (2026-08-24), the Abu Dhabi state-backed developer's second BESS project to start up in the United Kingdom as it pushes toward a three-gigawatt-hour national portfolio.5
The Rochdale startup landed within days of Santander closing £42.7 million in financing for a separate BESS project in Immingham, announced on Wednesday (2026-08-12), illustrating how quickly both sovereign-backed developers and commercial bank capital are moving into UK grid-scale storage simultaneously.4
Masdar has earmarked £1 billion, around $1.36 billion at current exchange rates, for its UK storage push, a commitment the company first set out in February 2024. Beyond Rochdale, its pipeline includes projects in Chesterfield and Cardiff with a combined capacity of 150 megawatts and 300 megawatt-hours. Last month, Masdar completed £97 million in project financing covering those two sites and the now-operating Rochdale facility.5
Under the UK's Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, the government is targeting 27.1 gigawatt-hours of BESS capacity across England, Scotland and Wales by the end of the decade, a figure that makes even the most active financing quarters look incremental against the total ask.5
UK power forward prices help explain why the economics still attract lenders. UK Power Q+1 was at £138.99 per megawatt-hour and UK Power Cal+1 at £103.29 per megawatt-hour as of Tuesday morning (2026-08-25), price levels that reward storage assets able to capture intraday swings rather than locking in flat baseload revenue.
The Santander deal at Immingham is one of several commercial financing transactions closing as UK developers move from planning consent into construction. North Lincolnshire Council approved Lightrock Power's 800-megawatt Sweetbriar Energy Park near Ulceby on Tuesday (2026-07-14), a project that, if built, would rank among the largest standalone storage sites in the country.3
In late June (2026-06-24), NatPower and Tesla signed a multi-year supply and execution agreement covering more than 25 gigawatt-hours of BESS across Italy and the United Kingdom. That single deal, if fully delivered, would on its own approach the entire UK government storage target in scale.1
Planning, though, is producing uneven results. A BESS proposal for the West Lane site in County Durham, backed by Rewe 8 (whose representative told the planning committee that battery systems "played a crucial role in decarbonising the national grid"), was ultimately rejected despite the committee itself arguing for the site's development.4
The West Lane rejection reflects how planning decisions remain calibrated at the local level even as central government has set targets that require rapid and repeated consent approvals across many sites. Capital is moving faster than the consent pipeline.4
Globally, battery storage installations are forecast to reach 200 gigawatts and 655 gigawatt-hours of cumulative capacity by 2031, with the utility sector accounting for 85 percent of installations, according to oilprice.com reporting on industry forecasts. The UK competes with Italy, Germany and other European markets for the same equipment pools and specialist finance over that period.2
Masdar's Chesterfield and Cardiff projects, both now financed, are the next indicator of UK construction velocity. The planning system's capacity to consent new sites at the rate capital is arriving into the sector is what projects like Santander's Immingham deal still cannot settle.5,4