Highview’s 300MWh liquid air storage plant in Manchester shows how long-duration energy storage, AI, and green technology will keep renewables reliable at scale.
Why a 300MWh Liquid Air Plant Matters Right Now
Greater Manchester is about to store 300MWh of electricity in air.
Construction has started on Highview’s liquid air energy storage (LAES) plant in Carrington: a 50MW system that can deliver clean power for six hours, integrate with existing grid infrastructure, and run for 40–50 years without performance fade. For a region aiming to hit net zero while keeping the lights on, that’s a big deal.
This isn’t just another energy project. It’s a glimpse of how green technology and AI-driven energy systems will keep modern economies running on wind and solar — without falling back on fossil backup every time the weather changes.
In this article, I’ll unpack what Highview is building, why liquid air energy storage is attracting serious money, how it fits into the wider long-duration energy storage (LDES) landscape, and what this means for businesses planning their own net zero and resilience strategies.
What Is Liquid Air Energy Storage – And Why Use It?
Liquid air energy storage turns excess renewable power into cold, dense liquid air, then back into electricity when the grid actually needs it.
Here’s the basic flow:
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Charging (when power is cheap or surplus)
- Electricity from wind or solar runs industrial compressors.
- Air is cleaned, compressed, cooled to around −196°C, and stored in insulated tanks as a liquid.
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Storage (hours to weeks)
- Liquid air sits in tanks at low pressure. There’s no self-discharge like batteries, and tanks are relatively simple steel infrastructure.
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Discharging (when power is needed)
- Liquid air is pumped to high pressure and warmed.
- As it boils back into a gas, it expands rapidly and drives a turbine to generate electricity.
- No combustion, no direct emissions.
Why does this matter for green technology?
Because wind and solar are variable. On windy nights or sunny weekends, the grid often has too much renewable power. Grid operators then curtail generation or even pay wind farms to shut down. Long-duration storage like LAES can:
- Absorb that surplus instead of wasting it.
- Firm up renewables into dispatchable power (you can call on it at specific times).
- Provide grid services like inertia, short-circuit strength, and voltage support when designed with a “stability island” as Highview is doing.
Compared with lithium-ion batteries, LAES brings a few important advantages for system-level planning:
- Long lifetime: 40–50 years with no degradation under typical cycling.
- Non-flammable, non-toxic working fluid: it’s just air.
- Scalable with mature industrial kit: compressors, turbines, tanks – technology power engineers already know.
This doesn’t replace batteries; it complements them. Batteries are great for seconds-to-two-hour problems. LAES is better suited to multi-hour and multi-day balancing, especially at large scales.
Inside Highview’s 300MWh Carrington Project
Highview’s Carrington facility is being built at Trafford Low Carbon Energy Park, right next to existing grid infrastructure. That siting choice is not accidental.
Core Specs
- Capacity: 50MW output
- Storage: 300MWh
- Duration: 6 hours at full output
- Location: Carrington, Greater Manchester, UK
- Planned operation: Late 2026
- Claim: World’s largest commercial-scale liquid air energy storage plant
The plant connects into the local substation and transmission network and will include a stability island: an independent synchronous condenser and associated power electronics that help anchor local grid stability.
“Storing renewable energy power so it’s there when people need it will be essential for Greater Manchester in the years ahead.” – Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester
That quote gets to the point. This isn’t about storage as a gadget; it’s about making a renewables-heavy grid actually work for people and businesses.
The “Stability Island” Advantage
Purely inverter-based resources (like solar PV and standard battery inverters) don’t naturally provide inertia or short-circuit strength. As coal and gas plants retire, the grid risks becoming more fragile.
Highview’s approach in both Carrington and its Scottish project adds:
- Synchronous condensers for inertia and fault current.
- Advanced power electronics to manage voltage, frequency, and reactive power.
- Fast-responding stored energy that can step in during outages or sudden demand swings.
For grid operators, that combination — long-duration storage plus classical grid stability functions — is far more attractive than storage alone.
The Money Behind Long-Duration Green Storage
You don’t build a first-of-a-kind 300MWh LAES plant without serious backing. Highview has raised over £430 million for its UK portfolio in the last couple of years.
For Carrington specifically:
- £300 million came from the UK National Wealth Fund, energy major Centrica, and investors including Rio Tinto, Goldman Sachs, KIRKBI, and Mosaic Capital.
For its Scottish stability island project:
- £130 million was secured to develop a grid-stabilising facility that will sit alongside a future long-duration storage plant.
Why would traditional industrial and financial players back a mechanical storage startup?
Because the market signal is clear:
- The UK has legally binding net-zero targets by 2050.
- National Grid ESO has repeatedly flagged the need for tens of gigawatts of storage, with a large chunk being long-duration.
- Policy is shifting toward valuing flexibility, stability, and firm low-carbon capacity — not just raw megawatt-hours.
Investors are betting that LAES will sit alongside lithium-ion, pumped hydro, and compressed air as one of the practical long-duration energy storage options that can be built near load centers without complex geography.
From a green technology series perspective, this is a textbook example of where AI, data, and physical infrastructure meet:
- AI forecasts wind, solar, and demand.
- Optimisation software schedules when to charge and discharge the LAES plant to maximise value.
- The physical plant carries out those decisions at scale.
The smarter the forecasting and dispatch algorithms become, the more profitable — and more climate-positive — these assets get.
How LAES Fits Into the Wider Energy Storage Landscape
Most companies planning decarbonisation projects instinctively jump to lithium batteries. That’s often a mistake for large, long-duration needs.
Here’s the thing about long-duration energy storage: it’s not one technology, it’s a toolbox. Each tool solves a different kind of problem.
LAES vs Lithium-Ion Batteries
Where lithium-ion shines:
- Sub-second to 2-hour balancing
- Fast-response frequency services
- Co-located with solar or wind for daily arbitrage
- Behind-the-meter solutions for businesses
Where LAES helps more:
- 4–12+ hour storage at large, grid-scale projects
- Reducing curtailment from large wind clusters
- Seasonal and weekly balancing when built at bigger scales
- Projects that need 40+ years life with low degradation concerns
Lithium-ion is fantastic, but cycling it daily for deep discharges over decades raises cost and resource questions. LAES, using air and industrial steel, is easier to align with circular economy and low-embedded-carbon principles, especially as manufacturing cleans up.
LAES vs Other Mechanical and Thermal Storage
Compared with compressed air energy storage (CAES), which usually needs underground caverns, LAES can be sited almost anywhere with enough space, grid access, and industrial permitting. Compared with pumped hydro, it doesn’t need mountains or valleys.
That siting flexibility is valuable for:
- Urban or peri-urban low-carbon energy parks (like Trafford).
- Regions lacking suitable geology for hydro or CAES.
- Data centers and industrial clusters that need local resilience.
For green technology planners, the message is simple: if you’re thinking about resilience, flexibility, and decarbonisation beyond a basic battery farm, LAES deserves a spot on your shortlist of options.
What This Means for Cities, Businesses, and Green-Tech Planners
LAES isn’t just an engineering curiosity. It changes what’s possible for cities, utilities, and large power users.
For Cities and Regions
Greater Manchester’s choice to host a commercial-scale LAES plant signals a specific strategy:
- Use local long-duration storage to support high renewable penetration.
- Strengthen grid stability as fossil generators retire.
- Anchor a low-carbon industrial cluster at Trafford Low Carbon Energy Park.
Other cities aiming for net-zero can draw a simple lesson: you can’t hit climate targets with generation alone. You need firm, low-carbon capacity and stability services to match.
For Utilities and Grid Operators
If you’re planning a high-renewables grid for the 2030s and 2040s, you should be asking:
- Where will multi-hour, multi-day flexibility come from?
- Which technologies can survive 40–50 years of regulation changes and still be useful assets?
- How do we combine storage and stability functions in single sites to reduce system costs?
Projects like Carrington show one viable template: co-locating long-duration storage with grid stability infrastructure, close to demand.
For Large Energy Users and Developers
If you’re a data center operator, large manufacturer, or developer of low-carbon industrial hubs, LAES-like systems open up options such as:
- Locally stored, low-carbon backup instead of diesel generators.
- On-site or nearby flexibility that lets you contract for high shares of wind/solar without worrying about intermittency.
- Participation in flexibility markets and ancillary services to generate new revenue streams.
In practice, you’ll pair this with AI-driven energy management: forecasting loads, committing demand response, scheduling when to run energy-intensive processes, and coordinating with storage assets.
How AI Supercharges Long-Duration Green Storage
AI isn’t just a buzzword in green technology; it’s what turns a plant like Carrington from an expensive asset into a high-performing one.
Here’s where AI and advanced analytics make a genuine difference:
- Forecasting: More accurate wind, solar, and demand forecasts mean better decisions on when to charge and discharge. Even a 2–3% improvement in forecasting accuracy can materially lift revenue.
- Optimised dispatch: Algorithms can trade off wholesale prices, balancing services, and constraint markets in real time, choosing the most profitable service stack for each hour.
- Asset health and lifetime: Predictive maintenance uses sensor data to spot anomalies in compressors, turbines, and cryogenic systems before they fail, extending lifetime and cutting outages.
- Portfolio coordination: In a future system, you won’t just have LAES; you’ll have batteries, flexible loads, EV fleets, and more. AI optimises them as a portfolio, not as isolated assets.
This matters because long-duration storage has to run hard for decades to pay back its capital cost. The smarter the software, the faster that payback and the stronger the climate impact.
Where This Fits in the Green Technology Transition
Most companies get energy strategy wrong by focusing only on generation — the solar farm, the rooftop PV array, the wind contract. The reality is simpler and harsher: without serious storage and flexibility, clean generation hits a wall.
Highview’s 300MWh liquid air energy storage plant is an example of the kind of infrastructure we’re going to see a lot more of:
- Long-lived, largely recyclable assets built on industrial technology.
- Deeply integrated with transmission networks and stability services.
- Operated by AI-driven platforms that squeeze value out of every megawatt-hour.
If your organisation is planning for net zero, resilience, or new green-tech business models, the next step is to think beyond “buy some renewables” and start asking:
- What kind of firm, low-carbon capacity do we need in 5, 10, 20 years?
- Which storage technologies match our duration, scale, and location constraints?
- How can we use AI and data to run those assets as profitably and cleanly as possible?
Liquid air energy storage isn’t the only answer. But as Carrington shows, it’s quickly moving from pilot to serious, grid-scale infrastructure. The organisations that start planning around long-duration storage now will be the ones that can run reliably on renewables later.