The United Kingdom is regarded by the global energy storage industry as a textbook example of a "merchant storage" market. The revenue of storage assets here heavily depends on precise participation in a diverse mix of wholesale market trading, balancing mechanisms, and capacity markets. Faced with a market poised for "five-fold growth in five years" and an increasingly complex trading environment, traditional experience-driven operation models are nearing their limits. Chinese companies, led by Envision Group, are at the forefront of integrating physical artificial intelligence and energy AI models into storage systems, driving a paradigm shift from "hardware assets" to "AI-powered assets," offering a Chinese solution to unlocking the market's immense value.

The Revenue Challenge and Evolution in a Merchant Market

The UK's mature electricity market creates multiple revenue streams for storage, including Capacity Market contracts, ancillary services like frequency response, and arbitrage opportunities in the spot electricity market. However, this liberalization also brings significant volatility. For instance, China Huaneng's Mendi storage project in the UK initially relied on frequency response for good returns but saw its revenue decline as market competition intensified, forcing it to adopt a diversified model combining capacity agreements with energy arbitrage. Concurrently, the number of negative electricity price hours in the UK increased to 188 in 2024, creating arbitrage windows but also demanding more from forecasting and dispatch algorithms. The financial performance of a storage asset is increasingly determined by its "intelligence."

A Paradigm Shift: Energy AI Models Drive "Quantifiable, Replicable, Sustainable" Returns

In this context, the breakthrough weapon for Chinese companies is no longer confined to battery cost and system integration but has ascended to system-level intelligence and AI empowerment. The solution provided by Envision for the colossal 680MW/1.36GWh Carrington project in the UK recently clearly outlines this new paradigm. This project is not only one of the largest standalone storage facilities in the UK but is also set to become a global benchmark powered at its core by an "Energy AI Model".

Envision's smart energy storage system, built upon its "Envision Ark" Energy AI Model and "Envision Galileo" weather model, creates an intelligent closed loop of "forecast-dispatch-trading-self-learning". The system enables real-time grid perception and highly accurate electricity price forecasting, with a claimed accuracy rate of over 90%. Based on multi-dimensional data, the model can automatically generate optimal charge-discharge strategies and execute them within milliseconds, thereby maximizing asset returns in the complex market environment. This signifies that the operation of storage projects is transitioning from reliance on human expertise to a standardized, replicable, and sustainable process driven by data and models.

Future Competition: From Equipment Supplier to Full-Lifecycle Value Partner

This "model-driven" paradigm is redefining the role of Chinese companies in the UK's energy storage value chain. They are evolving from mere equipment suppliers into technology and operation partners capable of ensuring efficient and stable profitability throughout an asset's entire lifecycle. This value enhancement is crucial for attracting long-term capital and facilitating financing for large-scale projects. The Carrington project itself brought together several energy and financial institutions including Statera Energy, Lloyds Bank, Statkraft, and NatWest, demonstrating strong market confidence in AI-enhanced large-scale storage projects.

Conclusion: Intelligence is the Key to Sustainable Success

The explosive growth of the UK energy storage market is an increase in both scale and complexity. The next phase of breakthrough for Chinese companies must transcend "inward-rolling" hardware cost competition and advance to higher-dimensional competition centered on artificial intelligence and software algorithms. By evolving energy storage systems into "AI-powered assets" capable of autonomous perception, decision-making, and optimization, Chinese companies are not only providing crucial support for the UK's 2030 clean power goals but are also defining the value standard for the next generation of storage systems globally. This technology-driven paradigm revolution may well determine who will stand firm at the pinnacle of the global energy storage market in the next five years.