Vitreous LabsEnergy transparency

Burwell Weirs Drove BESS

50 MW in Mid Wales and The Midlands. Everything on this page is read from published data for the 364 days to 27 September 2026, or is labelled as an estimate.

Part of Burwell Weirs Drove BESS, one of 3 balancing units at one site totalling 126 MW. This page is the E_BURWB-1 unit alone.

This registration has been superseded. The battery here has sold as Burwell 1 since 26 November 2025; this code, sold by Arenko Cleantech Limited, last appeared on 6 October 2025. The page stays for the record, and the unit is no longer counted in fleet totals or ranked in the league.

What it is

Registered power50 MW balancing mechanism registration
Charging zoneMid Wales and The Midlands
PostcodeCB25
Balancing mechanism unitE_BURWB-1

Who owns it and who trades it

Traded byArenko Cleantech Limitedruns several sitesconfirmed, Elexon's register
Owned bynot published anywhere we can read
UltimatelyVoltwise Power (Sandbrook Capital) confirmed source

How we know. The register names no owner. The capacity market holds a site called BURWB1 belonging to Voltwise Power Holdings Limited, which is this unit's own balancing code, and Burwell Weirs Drove is a two phase Voltwise site of about 126 MW operated by Ethical Power.

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 27 September 2026
Balancing mechanism£23k
Response and reserve auctions auction implied£42k
Capacity marketno agreement we can attach
Three lines together£64k

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 255 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. 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. 42 days to 10 November 2025. Method and caveats

LineMWh or £
Metered export, what crossed the meter out307 MWh
Metered import, what crossed the meter in402 MWh
Equivalent full cycles, everything sent out over one full charge·
Apparent meter to meter efficiency76%, worth investigating: more than ordinary losses
Balancing offers accepted380 MWh
Balancing bids accepted59 MWh
Position outside balancing, export247 MWh
Position outside balancing, import664 MWh
Of which expected response delivery, net9 MWh 33 out, 24 in
Traded position, net−426 MWh 238 out, 664 in
Traded position at the market index, sold£23k
Traded position at the market index, bought£28k
Traded position, net, at the index−£6k
Response delivery, net, at the imbalance price£496 £752 at the index
Balancing and outside balancing together£18k £3.02/kW/yr

When it moved, against when power was dear

Across every half hour this unit was metered the market index averaged £72.55. What it sent out was worth £96.45 a megawatt hour at that same index, 1.33 times the average. What it took in was worth £42.82, 0.59 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 59 MWh of accepted bids it paid an average of £50.34 a megawatt hour. The market index averaged £87.89 across those same half hours, so it bought back at £37.55 a megawatt hour below the going price.

Price it paidVolumeAverageCash
below zero6 MWh−£21.63£120 received
£0 to £254 MWh£10.49£46
£25 to £5011 MWh£40.16£434
£50 to £7538 MWh£68.49£3k

On 6 MWh the price was below zero: NESO paid this unit an average of £21.63 a megawatt hour to take energy, £120 in all. That is a constrained network with more generation on it than it can move.

The other direction, offers, is much smaller here: 380 MWh where NESO asked for more, paid at an average of £66.99 against an index of £35.94.

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

  • only 42 of 364 days metered

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
Grendon502h£76.3/kW/yr
Sundon BESS502h£71.2/kW/yr
Creyke Beck50not known£65.2/kW/yr
Pivot Power Coventry502h£59.6/kW/yr
Chapel Farm BESS502h£40.9/kW/yr
Burwell Weirs Drove BESSthis battery50not known£1.3/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.