While the UK government’s long-duration energy storage (LDES) cap-and-floor scheme is a sound approach, there is a lively discussion around how much to procure in the first Window.
April 27, 2026
While the UK government’s long-duration energy storage (LDES) cap-and-floor scheme is a sound approach, there is a lively discussion around how much to procure in the first Window.
The topic was in focus on the ‘Driving LDES Forward: The Perfect Time to Invest?’ discussion at the Energy Storage Summit 2026 in London in February, put on by our publisher Solar Media, which is part of Informa Markets. 
The government released its list of eligible projects for the scheme in September last year, with 2.7-7.7GW of 8-hour-plus capacity targeted in its initial Window. Of these projects, 70% are lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (BESS). 
The panel had speakers from developer-operators Field and NatPower and energy storage suppliers Trina Storage, Fluence and Invinity Energy Systems. 
In response to a question from moderator Cameron Murray of Energy-Storage.news, most, though not all, agreed that the government should be wary not to over-procure capacity in this first round.
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While the scheme should certainly have a minimum capacity target to give the market confidence, you don’t want to procure too much, said Nick Provost, sales manager for Trina Storage, the BESS arm of solar PV giant TrinaSolar.
“We think the cap-and-floor is well designed but there’ll always be an unintended consequence that you won’t be able to fix if we do too much too soon,” Provost said. “2-3GW would be a reasonable outcome from the first round which would be a good balance between giving market signals but protecting consumers.” 
Brian Perusse, UK and Ireland MD for BESS integrator Fluence, agreed and said that rather than procuring loads now there should be smaller regular procurements which would also help build up a sustainable industry. 
“I’d rather see 3GW every few years rather than, say, 7GW now,” he said.
Bex Sherwood, head of development for Field, also agreed. She said that the current round looks to solve the inter-day challenge of storage, but not the inter-week or seasonal, which requires much higher durations. 
“The technology for those isn’t there yet, but we need to make sure we’ve left space for it to come and not over-procured now,” she said. 
However, John Sturman, MD of NatPower said he disagreed with most of these points. 
“I agree there are risks of over-procuring LDES technology, they need to be proven. I don’t agree for lithium-ion BESS,” he explained. 
“For those, we are just doing more of the same. We are already doing 2-hour BESS, all this would be doing is making those bigger. What we need to do is push the 2-hour ones off the network (the grid connection queue), and replace them with the 8-hour ones.” 
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“Procuring only, say, 2GW in this first round is nowhere near what is needed. We have an ambitious Clean Power 2030 policy, and the delivery and support has to match that ambition. I see no risk in going big and hard for lithium-ion.” 
Note that both Field and NatPower have sizeable BESS projects that made the list of the eligible projects for the first Window of the LDES scheme. However, NatPower has the most, and the scheme appears to be core to its business model. 
Interestingly, the risk of over-procurement was mainly discussed in relation to being most cost-effective for the UK electricity bill payer, who will ultimately fund this. Some short-duration BESS owners meanwhile are opposing the scheme because, they say, it will negatively affect the continued buildout of merchant short-duration projects, one of the UK’s clean energy success stories so far. 
You can watch the full video recording of the panel discussion with a subscription to ESN Premium here.
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Cameron Murray
Senior Reporter, Informa
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