Chris Wickins: It’s a fantastic result for Field. Ofgem has run a landmark global scheme here, and reading the Minded To decision, you really get a sense of the amount of work they’ve done to identify the best long-duration projects the market had to offer. They attracted significant interest—177 projects reducing down to 77.
The process for Field started in 2022 or certainly 2023. We procured consultancy work asking: if you’re developing a project that will go operational toward 2030, what’s the right duration to build? At the time, final investment decisions were going through for one-hour or two-hour duration projects, but if your COD is 2028, 2029, or 2030, what duration should you be developing now?
The answer didn’t come out as 16-hour or 18-hour duration, but it did indicate that if you’re in certain locations—the north of Scotland, East Anglia, behind constraints—longer duration might be as good as shorter duration. Field responded by securing much larger land plots than we might have done otherwise, keeping our options open for either shorter or longer duration projects.
At the beginning of 2024, the scheme was really just designed for pumped hydro projects. We were vocal advocates, along with the Electricity Storage Network (ESN), for the long-duration scheme being genuinely technology agnostic. We responded to the consultation saying this should be a technology agnostic scheme with as much competition as possible.
