But plans to carpet Britain in batteries face a series of hurdles, aside from disgruntled locals.
Operators face a wait of more than a decade for projects to be hooked up to the grid, says Andy Willis, the founder of Kona Energy, which is planning a mega battery installation in Scotland that would allow it to pull energy coming in from offshore wind farms.
Willis blames a series of “speculative” projects which are allowed to apply for a grid connection despite not having planning permission or even land to build on.
“We’ve fortunately got a grid connection in place, but let’s say we had planning permission, we secured the land and we had funding ready to go: it’s likely we’d get a 2037 or 2038 date for a grid connection,” he says. “It’s kind of perverse.”
The National Grid is reforming how it arranges grid connections, but Willis says the current situation would make it hard for a government to plan how much battery capacity Britain might have in a few years’ time.
“If we had a world where a few of those nuclear plants did have to come offline soon, there is that question of, are we going to have a bit of a supply issue here?” he says.
Frankland says battery operators have struggled to get crucial parts such as interconnectors amid a global grid battery boom.
Suppliers have also griped at a lack of government support – lithium-ion batteries were excluded from plans announced under the last government to provide minimum payments for electricity storage.
And compared to longer-lasting types of storage such as pumped hydroelectric generation, batteries can also only step in for so long. The majority of battery sites in the UK are approved to store energy for a maximum of two hours, although sites have been rated for up to six hours more recently.
Local opposition is unlikely to abate. Proposed sites across Britain have been met with protests, especially since many are near electricity substations that place them in residential areas.
None of this has seemed to turn off investors. Even if many of the hundreds of announced projects are unlikely to hook up a single cell, battery storage capacity is due to more than treble to 15.4 GW by the end of 2027, according to Modo – meaning capacity will meet the National Grid’s most optimistic scenario from a year ago.
And while the Government has yet to endorse a battery blitz in the same way it has pushed for more wind and solar, storage is likely to be a knock-on winner.
Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, last week approved a deal for an 80-megawatt battery project run by a former Chinese diplomat, in a potential sign of Labour’s openness.
That might be an ominous sign for Granborough’s disgruntled homeowners – and many groups like them across Britain.