Email Cubico’s 50MW Owl’s Hatch solar PV plant, the firm’s biggest UK solar project to date. Image: Cubico Sustainable Investments. Cubico Sustainable Investments (Cubico) will begin constructing its first battery storage project in the UK after signing agreements with Tesla. Global renewable energy investor Cubico said this morning that a battery supply agreement (BSA) and long-term service agreement (LTSA) have been signed with Tesla for the 47.5MW/95MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Dorset. Cubico’s Mannington BESS is the investor’s first project in a 3.6GW global pipeline to reach construction. The company said that its pipeline comprises 1.3GW of schemes at an advanced stage of development and 2.3GW of greenfield projects still at the early development stages. The 2-hour duration Mannington BESS will connect to National Grid’s existing 400kV substation close to the project site. Construction is set to begin early this year for commissioning in 2026. To date, Cubico Sustainable Investments has brought solar PV and wind renewable energy projects into operation, as well as transmission infrastructure in global markets, including North and South America, Southern Europe, and the UK. Projects in construction include a 504MW onshore wind power plant in Queensland, Australia. In the BESS space, Cubico formed a joint venture (JV) targeting the development of 1GW of battery storage in Italy with developer and consultancy Storaltil in February 2024, as reported by our sister site Energy-Storage.news. In the UK, it claims to have a 2,400MW combined pipeline of projects in development across multiple technologies. In 2021, it set up a joint venture for UK solar and onshore wind with British property and infrastructure investor Peel NRE, targeting the development of 500MW of generation capacity. Cubico later took over total ownership of the JV, Peel Cubico Renewables (PCR) in early 2024. A second consultation phase was launched last November for one of the projects the JV is currently developing, the 130MW Frodsham Solar power plant. Being in excess of 50MW generation capacity, Frodsham is classed as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP). Earlier this week, Solar Power Portal published a deep dive article on the many gigawatts of planned large-scale solar PV and BESS NSIPs around the UK. Meanwhile the Mannington BESS’s supplier-system integrator Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk said in a recent quarterly results earning that its energy storage business is “growing like wildfire,” has just begun trial production of battery storage technology at a new factory in Shanghai, China. This is in addition to a dedicated factory for its Megapack grid-scale BESS solution in California. Tesla was ranked last year as the only AAA-rated supplier in the first edition of the Battery StorageTech Bankability Ratings report from our colleagues at PV Tech Research. Analyst and author of the report Charlotte Gisbourne blogged about the inaugural quarterly report’s findings in October for Energy-Storage.news.