World’s largest offshore wind farm to also feature first directly integrated grid-scale battery

Renew Economy20 Aug 2026AI generated

Ørsted has signed an agreement this week for Arenko to deploy its full Nimbus optimisation, asset management and trading platform on Iceni, the 300 MW/600 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) being built alongside the 2.9 GW Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm. Construction of Iceni began in March, uses Tesla batteries and is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2027. Iceni is the world's first utility-scale battery integrated directly into an offshore wind farm's transmission infrastructure — it sits on the same land as the onshore converter station and shares transmission assets and a grid connection with Hornsea 3 rather than having its own. Hornsea 3, whose 197 turbines are due for completion by end-2027, will power the equivalent of 3.3 million UK homes. Arenko CEO Rupert Newland said the scale of coupling a grid battery with one of the UK's biggest offshore wind farms creates forecasting, real-time capacity allocation and technical integration challenges that Nimbus is built to automate.

Source