BBC North West Tonight Feature

Yesterday evening, EnergyPathways plc's MESH project was featured on BBC North West Tonight, highlighting the role Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) could play in strengthening the UK’s energy system.

During the interview, CEO Ben Clube explained how the MESH integrated energy storage project could help lower consumer energy bills while creating significant economic opportunities for Barrow-in-Furness and the North West.

MESH is designed to tackle one of the UK's biggest energy challenges: renewable intermittency.

When the grid cannot handle high volumes of intermittent wind power, operators are forced to pay wind farms to switch off. These curtailment costs already run into billions of pounds a year and are ultimately passed on to consumers through their energy bills. NESO estimates that overall balancing costs could rise to around £8 billion a year by 2030, unless new forms of flexible long-duration storage come on stream.

Rather than wasting surplus renewable electricity, the project is designed to use that energy to compress air into vast underground salt caverns beneath the East Irish Sea. When renewable generation falls, or electricity demand rises, the compressed air can be released to drive turbines and generate reliable, dispatchable low-carbon power.

What truly differentiates MESH is its scale. With a storage duration of more than seven days, it has the potential to provide the multi-day resilience that today's battery storage systems cannot. That capability could prove critical during prolonged periods of low wind generation and help to reduce reliance on the costly imported gas energy that makes our electricity bills so high.

EnergyPathways’ MESH project, expected to be the UK’s largest integrated energy storage project, will harness wasted wind power, bolster energy security and help lower consumer bills.  Designated a project of “national significance” by the UK Government, and recently awarded a Gas Storage License by the North Sea Transition Authority, MESH combines compressed air electrical storage (CAES) with natural gas and hydrogen storage.

Link to BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002yr1b/north-west-tonight-evening-news-07072026