Woburn Road

What it is

The power on this page comes from the owner. Gridsource, which developed the battery and whose company holds it, describes Woburn Road in Bedfordshire as a 12 MW and 24 MWh energy storage plant, two hours (its project page, and its case study of 1 October 2025). Elexon registers the unit at 10 MW. The meter agrees with the developer: across 17,470 half hours from 20 October 2025 to 20 October 2026 it averaged more than 10 MW sending power out in 105 of them, up to 12.9 MW, and up to 12.4 MW taking it in, which a 10 MW battery cannot do. Every per kilowatt figure on this site is worked from 12 MW. Read the announcement.

Where the duration comes from. Gridsource, which developed the battery, describes Woburn Road as 12 MW and 24 MWh, a two hour system (gridsource.co.uk). Until 25 October 2026 this page gave 2 hours from the capacity market class on the registered 10 MW, so 20 MWh. What the battery declares to NESO agrees with its developer: in the fullest 5% of 540 half hours from 13 to 24 October 2026, the energy it held plus its room to charge came to 25 MWh. Its longest unbroken discharge on the meter in the year to 20 October 2026 was 26.6 MWh, on 5 March 2026, a little more than 24 MWh, which may be the published figures rounded down. Every megawatt hour figure on this site for this battery is worked from 2 hours.

Who owns it and who trades it

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

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 5,983 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 6 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. 358 days to 5 November 2026, 42 of them still provisional in Elexon's settlement runs. Method and caveats

This battery connects to a distribution network. For such a unit the volumes Elexon publishes are settlement volumes: the site's own meter multiplied by the network operator's line loss factor for that half hour. The factor is usually within a few per cent of one, so the megawatt hours, cycles and efficiency above can sit a little above or below what crossed the site's meter. The money is settled on the same adjusted volumes. Method and caveats

When it moved, against when power was dear

Across every half hour this unit was metered the market index averaged £104.66. What it sent out was worth £138.01 a megawatt hour at that same index, 1.32 times the average. What it took in was worth £85.53, 0.82 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 2,431 MWh of accepted bids it paid an average of £77.67 a megawatt hour. The market index averaged £108.89 across those same half hours, so it bought back at £31.22 a megawatt hour below the going price.

On 254 MWh the price was below zero: NESO paid this unit an average of £27.24 a megawatt hour to take energy, £7k in all. That is a constrained network with more generation on it than it can move.

The other direction, offers, is much smaller here: 3,079 MWh where NESO asked for more, paid at an average of £121.81 against an index of £83.39.

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

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.

In its distribution register

The distribution register of UK Power Networks lists this site as Woburn Road, 12 MW, connected on 6 March 2025. Matched on a site word in common, 0 km apart.

See it on the Development Atlas

From each operator’s embedded capacity register, read every Monday. How the registers are linked to the units that trade.

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.