Vitreous LabsEnergy transparency

Roosecote BESS

49 MW in North Lancashire and The Lakes. 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 power49 MW balancing mechanism registration
Charging zoneNorth Lancashire and The Lakes
PostcodeLA13
Balancing mechanism unitE_ROOSB-1

Who owns it and who trades it

Traded byCBS ENERGY STORAGE ASSETS LTDconfirmed, Elexon's register
Owned byCBS ENERGY STORAGE ASSETS UK LIMITED
Owner established fromcapacity market registered holder
UltimatelyCentrica confirmed source

How we know. Centrica Business Solutions' own Roosecote case study.

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

Cellsover 100,000 second generation lithium ion cells (maker not named)
Entered operation2018-12 (construction from March 2017)
Connection voltage132 kV documented: connected to the 132 kV network via the Roosecote ENW substation

From published documents, not from any register: supplier and contractor project pages, owner announcements and the trade press. Confidence: confirmed. Checked 2026-08-31. source 1 · source 2. 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£69k
Response and reserve auctions auction implied£1.5m
Capacity market£1.4m
Three lines together£3.0m

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 16,164 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 16 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. 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 out4,132 MWh
Metered import, what crossed the meter in7,400 MWh
Equivalent full cycles, everything sent out over one full charge·
Apparent meter to meter efficiency56%, not ordinary battery losses alone
Balancing offers accepted1,403 MWh
Balancing bids accepted1,946 MWh
Position outside balancing, export4,140 MWh
Position outside balancing, import6,865 MWh
Of which expected response delivery, net459 MWh 1,794 out, 1,335 in
Traded position, net−3,184 MWh 3,038 out, 6,222 in
Traded position at the market index, sold£322k
Traded position at the market index, bought£463k
Traded position, net, at the index−£140k
Response delivery, net, at the imbalance price£30k £39k at the index
Balancing and outside balancing together−£50k £-1.07/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 £106.12 a megawatt hour at that same index, 1.14 times the average. What it took in was worth £74.35, 0.80 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 1,946 MWh of accepted bids it paid an average of £52.96 a megawatt hour. The market index averaged £93.83 across those same half hours, so it bought back at £40.87 a megawatt hour below the going price.

Price it paidVolumeAverageCash
below zero139 MWh−£15.75£2k received
£0 to £25242 MWh£13.82£3k
£25 to £50501 MWh£38.85£19k
£50 to £75555 MWh£61.53£34k
£75 to £100346 MWh£83.93£29k
above £100164 MWh£117.60£19k

On 139 MWh the price was below zero: NESO paid this unit an average of £15.75 a megawatt hour to take energy, £2k in all. That is a constrained network with more generation on it than it can move.

The other direction, offers, is much smaller here: 1,403 MWh where NESO asked for more, paid at an average of £116.77 against an index of £80.42.

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

  • returns only 56% of what it takes in, with 4,131 MWh exported all year, about 84 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/yr10th percentile98 units
Balancing incomeEngland and Wales peer group9th percentile70 units
All three measured lineswhole fleet, £/kW/yr79th percentile229 units
Energy sent outhours at full power19th percentile96 units
Energy taken inhours at full power7th 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 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
Melksham East492h£107.3/kW/yr
Roosecote BESSthis battery49not known£61.1/kW/yr
Tollgate Energy Storage494h£41.8/kW/yr
Cowley491h£31.6/kW/yr
SSE Salisbury492h£24.9/kW/yr
Brentwood49not known£8.2/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.