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Britain’s electricity grid was built for a different century. It grew up on coal, gas, and nuclear — big central power stations feeding predictable streams of electricity down fat transmission lines. The rise of wind and solar has flipped that model on its head. Now power is generated in thousands of places — offshore turbines, solar parks, rooftops — and it ebbs and flows with the weather.

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This is progress, but it comes with a problem: the grid was designed for constancy, not chaos. It needs flexibility. When a cloud bank rolls over the South West or the wind drops off the Yorkshire coast, the system operator must instantly plug the gap — historically with gas-fired power stations.

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If we’re serious about Net Zero, those gas stations have to retire. The question is: what replaces them?

Batteries Are the Missing Muscle

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Batteries can do what gas once did — only cleaner, faster, and without the carbon tab. They absorb surplus electricity when it’s plentiful (and cheap), then release it when demand peaks. The grid gets balance, renewables get breathing room, and fossil fuels get sidelined.

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The smart move is co-location —

putting batteries alongside renewable generation, so they can capture energy at the source. But there’s another, equally powerful option: distribute them everywhere.

Every Home a Mini Power Station

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This is where the British Battery Network (BBN) comes in. Imagine every home and small business in the country fitted with a battery — not just storing energy for personal use, but also supporting the grid. Individually, the impact is modest. Collectively, it’s transformative.

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With a million distributed batteries, Britain could smooth out the peaks and troughs of electricity demand without firing up a single extra gas turbine. The effect would be to literally replace fossil back-up with a clean, flexible alternative — all while putting money back into the pockets of the households and businesses taking part.

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What BBN Does

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We connect batteries to the UK’s flexibility markets, where the grid pays for access to stored energy in times of need. Whether you own your battery or take one on subscription, once you’re connected, your system charges when electricity is cheapest or greenest and discharges when it’s needed most. You keep your normal supply, but your battery works behind the scenes — saving, earning, and helping wean Britain off fossil fuels.

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It’s not charity; it’s a transaction. You provide flexibility. The grid pays you. And in the process, we accelerate the shift to Net Zero without waiting for a vast new fleet of infrastructure projects to be completed.

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The Transition Won’t Wait

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The grid needs our help now. Every battery added to the network is one more step away from carbon, one more step toward an energy system that can run — entirely — on renewables. The British Battery Network’s mission is to make that help simple, profitable, and nationwide.

The fossil era won’t end with a bang or a government press release. It will fade out, battery by battery, home by home — until the lights stay on, the air stays clean, and the gas plants are no more than a footnote in Britain’s energy history.