Our history
Noriker’s first site in partnership with Equinor, Blandford Road, reached its Commercial Operations Date early in 2024 marking a big step in our relationship with Equinor. Alongside this, the Cheltenham Ice Rink, which our Mobile Battery powered and optimised, ended with our unit saving vast amounts of fuel and lowering local emissions from previous events.
From projects in earlier stages, full planning permission was granted for our biggest site to date at 350 MW. Noriker also entered a tender process for four Synchronous condenser sites in Ireland and we are awaiting the outcome.
We celebrated 2023 by moving to the centre of Cheltenham, a beautiful spa town on the edge of the famous Cotswolds. We occupy the entire fourth floor with a 360-degree view of central Cheltenham, overlooking Imperial Gardens.
As well as breaking ground on two battery projects for Equinor, Noriker developed six Low Carbon Intertia Services projects in Ireland and continued to add to its multi-GW battery pipeline.
Equinor and Noriker enter a development co-operation agreement. The agreement includes the acquisition of a 45% stake in Noriker by Equinor with an option to acquire the full company at a later stage.
In addition to the equity investment, Equinor are granted the opportunity to directly participate in projects being matured by Noriker.
With the deal signed in December 2021, 2022 sees the partnership come to fruition, with a pipeline of new collaborative projects.
Our first Scottish site, a 30MW pure battery project at Byers Brae, was commissioned and put into commercial operation in March 2021, bringing the total battery storage and hybrid projects constructed and commissioned to date to over 250MW.
Noriker was one of just two companies in the UK to go live at the launch of National Grid's challenging Dynamic Containment service in September 2020, thanks to our innovative approach in the design and implementation of our proprietary control system. Despite the Covid interruptions, Noriker built two major battery storage projects, adding a further 100MW.>
With our trading desk completed, the team began 24/7 operations, marking the final stage of Noriker's vertical integration ambition.
In March 2019, Noriker commissioned a longer duration pure battery facility located in the
heart of the West Midlands.
The project design was responding to changing market conditions that envisaged a greater role in
Asset Optimisation and the Balancing Mechanism, partly due to a fall in FFR prices.
Noriker obtained its supplier's licence, and started developing its trading team, before
rounding off the year with its first 50MW project, completing G99 sign-off and full commissioning
just three weeks after energisation, with Christmas in between!
In April 2018 we completed a 20MW hybrid facility located near Melksham, with both batteries and engines. This project also provided services to the National Grid through DFFR and CM contracts.
In April 2017, Noriker completed its first site, a 20MW facility located near Newcastle-under-Lyme. The site was built as a hybrid comprising containerised batteries alongside engines, and provided Dynamic Firm Frequency Response (DFFR) to National Grid, as well as entering the Capacity Market (CM).
A further three sites, located in Bristol, Dartford and Mansfield, 30MW in total, were commissioned in 2017. These three sites co-operated autonomously (including state of charge balancing between sites) as a single contractual unit for DFFR and CM contracts, with Noriker delivering the remote operations and monitoring functions. The Noriker projects were the first, large scale, fully commercial battery sites built in the UK.
Noriker was founded in May 2015 in response to National Grid's call for new distribution connected Firm Frequency Response providers, and became instrumental in accelerating the "FFR from batteries" opportunity in the UK, being the first company to be granted DFFR contracts for batteries.