Vitreous LabsEnergy transparency

Neilston Battery 1

50 MW, about 95 MWh (1.9 hours, measured from its behaviour) in Stirlingshire and Fife. Everything on this page is read from published data for the 364 days to 27 September 2026, or is labelled as an estimate.

What it is

Registered power50 MW balancing mechanism registration
Storage duration1.9 hours measured from twenty one days of behaviour
Charging zoneStirlingshire and Fife
Connection siteNeilston
Balancing mechanism unitT_NLSTB-1

Who owns it and who trades it

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

How we know. The register names no owner. Neilston Greener Grid Park is Statkraft's own 50 MW transmission connected battery, built under the second stability pathfinder, and Statkraft is also the lead party here.

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 is built from

Battery systemFluence, transmission connected, built for synthetic inertia and short circuit strength
Connection voltage400 kV matched to queue site: Neilston 400kV Substation

From published documents, not from any register: supplier and contractor project pages, owner announcements and the trade press. Confidence: confirmed (supplier, owner). Checked 2026-08-31. source 1. Fields not shown are not published anywhere we have found, and we do not guess them.

What it earned

Line364 days to 27 September 2026
Balancing mechanism−£36
Response and reserve auctions auction implied£0
Capacity marketno agreement we can attach
Three lines togethernot netted

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. 346 days to 12 September 2026, 33 of them still provisional in Elexon's settlement runs. Method and caveats

LineMWh or £
Metered export, what crossed the meter out825 MWh
Metered import, what crossed the meter in1,425 MWh
Equivalent full cycles, everything sent out over one full charge8.7 over 346 days, 9.2 a year at that rate
Apparent meter to meter efficiency58%, not ordinary battery losses alone
Balancing offers accepted0 MWh
Balancing bids accepted2 MWh
Position outside balancing, export827 MWh
Position outside balancing, import1,425 MWh
Valued at the market index, sold£82k
Valued at the market index, bought£155k
Outside balancing, net, at the index−£73k
Balancing and outside balancing together−£73k £-1.55/kW/yr

When it moved, against when power was dear

Across every half hour this unit was metered the market index averaged £93.43. What it sent out was worth £99.31 a megawatt hour at that same index, 1.06 times the average. What it took in was worth £108.99, 1.17 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 MWh of accepted bids it paid an average of £20.09 a megawatt hour. The market index averaged £32.03 across those same half hours, so it bought back at £11.94 a megawatt hour below the going price.

Price it paidVolumeAverageCash
£0 to £252 MWh£20.09£36

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

  • returns only 58% of what it takes in, with 824 MWh exported all year, about 16 full power hours: a unit that barely cycles, where its own standing consumption and losses dominate a small throughput

Where it stands

Balancing incomewhole fleet, £/kW/yr1st percentile98 units
Balancing incomeScotland peer group1st percentile28 units
Balancing income1.9 hour duration cohort1st percentile62 units
All three measured lineswhole fleet, £/kW/yr1st percentile229 units
Energy sent outhours at full power1st percentile96 units
Energy taken inhours at full power1st percentile96 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 Scotland, 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
Wishaw BESS512h£44.7/kW/yr
Auchteraw492h£33.3/kW/yr
East Ayrshire (KILSB-2)522h£3.1/kW/yr
East Ayrshire (KILSB-1)532.1h£3.0/kW/yr
Shilton Lane BESS402h£2.2/kW/yr
Neilston Battery 1this battery501.9hnot netted

The three lines are not added together for this site. It paid £36 to charge and the lines we can measure paid it £0. The energy it bought was sold in the wholesale market and nothing published measures that sale, so subtracting one from the other would show a loss it does not make. Sites in this position are usually constraint assets, paid to absorb wind the network cannot move south.

Why every line reads zero

This registration has never appeared with an award or an acceptance in any market we read. That is the whole public record.

A quiet registration is not proof of a quiet battery: a site whose trading runs through an aggregator or a supplier appears under their identity, not its own, and publishes nothing per site.

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.