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Great Britain · the operating fleet

Zenobe Capenhurst (PINFB-4)

26 MW, about 16 MWh (0.6 hours, measured from its behaviour) in North Midlands and North Wales. Everything on this page is read from published data for the 364 days to 16 October 2026, or is labelled as an estimate.

Part of Zenobe Capenhurst, one of 4 balancing units at one site totalling 105 MW. This page is the T_PINFB-4 unit alone.

What it is

Registered power26 MW balancing mechanism registration
Storage duration0.6 hours measured from twenty one days of behaviour
Charging zoneNorth Midlands and North Wales
Connection siteCapenhurst 275kV
PostcodeCH1 6HE
Balancing mechanism unitT_PINFB-4

Who owns it and who trades it

Traded byZenobe Capenhurst Limitedconfirmed, Elexon's register
Owned byZENOBE CAPENHURST LIMITED
Owner established fromconnection register applicant
UltimatelyZenobe Energy confirmed source

How we know. The SPV name carries the group; kept here so the page reads consistently.

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−£8k
Response and reserve auctions auction implied£775k
Capacity marketno agreement we can attach
Three lines together£767k

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 a frequency response contract in 14,755 of those half hours. The energy the contract asked of it, contracted megawatts times NESO's published delivery curve at the measured grid frequency, is taken out of the position and valued at the imbalance price, because it sits outside the unit's declared position and that is the price Elexon settles it at. What remains is the traded position, valued at the market index. In 13 half hours a contract was held but the grid frequency is not yet held, so those are left in the traded position. 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. 359 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 out6,660 MWh
Metered import, what crossed the meter in7,960 MWh
Equivalent full cycles, everything sent out over one full charge427 over 359 days, 434 a year at that rate
Apparent meter to meter efficiency84%, an ordinary battery: round trip losses alone
Balancing offers accepted1,485 MWh
Balancing bids accepted2,533 MWh
Position outside balancing, export7,107 MWh
Position outside balancing, import7,360 MWh
Of which expected response delivery, net−584 MWh 1,417 out, 2,001 in
Traded position, net331 MWh 6,684 out, 6,353 in
Traded position at the market index, sold£744k
Traded position at the market index, bought£517k
Traded position, net, at the index£227k
Response delivery, net, at the imbalance price−£70k −£56k at the index
Balancing and outside balancing together£150k £5.88/kW/yr

When it moved, against when power was dear

Across every half hour this unit was metered the market index averaged £97.34. What it sent out was worth £111.26 a megawatt hour at that same index, 1.14 times the average. What it took in was worth £81.33, 0.84 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 2,533 MWh of accepted bids it paid an average of £75.65 a megawatt hour. The market index averaged £105.12 across those same half hours, so it bought back at £29.47 a megawatt hour below the going price.

Price it paidVolumeAverageCash
below zero206 MWh−£21.53£4k received
£0 to £25139 MWh£12.08£2k
£25 to £50161 MWh£39.29£6k
£50 to £75557 MWh£65.34£36k
£75 to £100855 MWh£85.98£73k
above £100615 MWh£127.04£78k

On 206 MWh the price was below zero: NESO paid this unit an average of £21.53 a megawatt hour to take energy, £4k in all. That is a constrained network with more generation on it than it can move.

The other direction, offers, is much smaller here: 1,485 MWh where NESO asked for more, paid at an average of £124.24 against an index of £87.92.

Physical checks passed: the meter never exceeded the registered power by more than fifteen per cent, and the year's exports against imports are what a battery does.

Where it stands

Balancing incomewhole fleet, £/kW/yr18th percentile100 units
Balancing incomeEngland and Wales peer group13th percentile72 units
Balancing income0.6 hour duration cohort29th percentile22 units
All three measured lineswhole fleet, £/kW/yr51st percentile230 units
Energy sent outhours at full power32nd percentile98 units
Energy taken inhours at full power24th percentile98 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. They run for about the same length of time. Same market, same rules, same weather.

BatteryMWHoursMeasured, per kW
Aylesford301h£86.3/kW/yr
Zenobe Capenhurst (PINFB-1)271h£54.8/kW/yr
Zenobe Capenhurst (PINFB-4)this battery260.6h£29.6/kW/yr
Zenobe Capenhurst (PINFB-3)260.6h£28.8/kW/yr
Zenobe Capenhurst (PINFB-2)260.6h£28.7/kW/yr
Pulse Clean (HAB12-FFR)211h£16.8/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.