IN Brief:
- West Sussex County Council is advancing a 16MW battery at Halewick Lane and a new three-year PV-plus-battery rollout across around 60 buildings and schools.
- The programme adds storage, on-site generation, and efficiency measures to an estate that already includes two solar farms and more than 70 school PV systems.
- The mix of grid services, self-consumption, and reinvested savings shows how local authorities are building longer-term energy infrastructure portfolios.
West Sussex County Council has set out a new phase of energy projects due to come on stream this year, combining utility-scale storage, distributed solar, and building-efficiency measures across its estate. The programme centres on the 16MW Halewick Lane battery energy storage system in Sompting, alongside a three-year rollout of new solar PV and battery systems at around 60 corporate buildings and schools.
The Halewick Lane project is being built on a former county council waste site and is intended to absorb electricity when generation is abundant and release it back to the grid when needed. The council says the system is on course for completion by the end of 2026, with Enable Infrastructure delivering construction and Green Frog Connect handling the grid connection works.
The wider pipeline builds on an estate that already includes more than 70 roof-mounted PV installations at schools and council buildings, plus two council-owned solar farms. At Tangmere, the authority’s first large-scale project, 18,300 solar panels were installed in 2015 and the original £5 million construction cost was repaid in eight years. A second site at Westhampnett, opened in 2018, combines 7.4MW of solar with a co-located 4MW battery and was developed without feed-in tariffs.
The next phase shifts the focus from standalone generation towards a more integrated estate model. Designs are ready for the next eight installations, covering schools, libraries, and fire stations, while a new Energy Reinvestment Fund will use savings from measures such as low-energy lighting and insulation to finance further upgrades over time.
That combination of front-of-meter storage, behind-the-meter PV and batteries, and recycled efficiency savings gives the council a broader operational role in the local power system. Further information on the storage project is available on the Halewick Lane project page.
