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Great Britain · the operating fleet

Thornton Battery

200 MW in Great Britain. Everything on this page is read from published data for the 364 days to 16 October 2026, or is labelled as an estimate.

Added automatically on 10 October 2026. Elexon's register lists this unit as a battery and the settlement archive shows the control room accepting bids or offers from it from 8 October 2026. Its location, owner and trader have not been checked yet, so it is not on the map and carries no owner. It is on the weekly fleet log to be checked.

What it is

Registered power200 MW balancing mechanism registration
Balancing mechanism unitT_BLWNB-1

Who owns it and who trades it

Traded byStatkraft Markets Gmbhruns several sitesconfirmed, Elexon's register
Owned bynot published anywhere we can read

Market registers name the party that sells into the market, which for a battery is usually an optimiser under contract rather than the owner. Elexon's balancing mechanism unit register names the seller here and the name is checked against it on every build. How we tell them apart

What it earned

Line364 days to 16 October 2026
Balancing mechanism£51k
Response and reserve auctions auction implied£0
Capacity marketno agreement we can attach
Three lines together£51k

Balancing is offer revenue and does not net off the cost of the power. The response and reserve figure is the value implied by the published auction results, award quantity times clearing price times the length of the delivery window, and not a settled payment. Capacity market income is the cleared price raised for inflation where the auction set a base period, split by month on EMRS's weights. Method

Outside the balancing mechanism, derived from the meter

Elexon publishes what this unit's meter recorded every half hour. Take away the balancing volumes NESO accepted and what is left is the position the unit ran outside the balancing mechanism: its wholesale trading, its frequency response delivery, and its losses, together. This unit held no frequency response contract in the window, so the whole position is treated as traded. The volumes are measured. The prices are public benchmarks, not this unit's trades. The product is derived, and is shown apart from the three measured lines above. 97 days to 11 October 2026, 45 of them still provisional in Elexon's settlement runs. Method and caveats

LineMWh or £
Metered export, what crossed the meter out7,355 MWh
Metered import, what crossed the meter in10,252 MWh
Equivalent full cycles, everything sent out over one full charge·
Apparent meter to meter efficiency72%, worth investigating: more than ordinary losses
Balancing offers accepted1,247 MWh
Balancing bids accepted1,115 MWh
Position outside balancing, export7,620 MWh
Position outside balancing, import10,648 MWh
Valued at the market index, sold£1.1m
Valued at the market index, bought£1.2m
Outside balancing, net, at the index−£161k
Balancing and outside balancing together−£160k £-3.01/kW/yr

When it moved, against when power was dear

Across every half hour this unit was metered the market index averaged £125.72. What it sent out was worth £141.08 a megawatt hour at that same index, 1.12 times the average. What it took in was worth £116.11, 0.92 times. Selling above one and buying below one is a unit positioned into the dear half hours and out of the cheap ones. It measures the half hours it chose, not the price anyone paid it, which is not published.

What it paid to buy energy back

When NESO accepts a bid, this unit delivers less than it had already sold, or takes more in. It pays for the energy it no longer delivers, and that payment is most of what makes the balancing figure above negative. Whether that is a cost or a margin depends on the price it paid. Across 1,115 MWh of accepted bids it paid an average of £95.88 a megawatt hour. The market index averaged £147.56 across those same half hours, so it bought back at £51.68 a megawatt hour below the going price.

Price it paidVolumeAverageCash
below zero76 MWh−£11.50£876 received
£0 to £252 MWh£19.63£44
£25 to £50171 MWh£37.85£6k
£50 to £7562 MWh£73.25£5k
£75 to £100329 MWh£86.96£29k
above £100474 MWh£143.54£68k

On 76 MWh the price was below zero: NESO paid this unit an average of £11.50 a megawatt hour to take energy, £876 in all. That is a constrained network with more generation on it than it can move.

The other direction, offers, is much smaller here: 1,247 MWh where NESO asked for more, paid at an average of £87.02 against an index of £45.94.

Checks this unit did not pass cleanly. Published anyway, because a flagged figure with its flag is more use than a blank.

  • only 97 of 364 days metered

Where it stands

All three measured lineswhole fleet, £/kW/yr10th percentile230 units

Percentiles, so 90 means better than nine in ten of the cohort named beside it, on that measure alone, over the same 364 days. Rates are pounds per kilowatt per year, annualised over the days the unit has been on the system, the same figures the performance league ranks on. A high position in the taken-in table is not a fault: a constraint asset is paid to charge, and charging is its job.

The nearest comparables

The five nearest in size in England and Wales, and this battery among them, ranked by what each was paid for every kilowatt it holds over the 364 days to the same date. How long this battery can run for is not published, so duration is not used to choose them. Same market, same rules, same weather.

BatteryMWHoursMeasured, per kW
Thurrock Flexible (THURB-1)1002h£76.9/kW/yr
Dollymans Storage1022h£49.7/kW/yr
Thurrock Flexible (THURB-3)1001.7h£48.8/kW/yr
Lakeside BESS1052h£38.2/kW/yr
Thurrock Flexible (THURB-2)1001.4h£31.5/kW/yr
Thornton Batterythis battery200not known£0.2/kW/yr

See it on the map

Open the operating map here

Every figure on this page traces to a published file. If something here is wrong about your asset, the methods section says how to tell us.