​A former coal power plant in Manchester is going to be transformed into a cutting-edge clean tech development, which will then become home to the largest energy storage system in the world to date.

Carlton Power, an independent infrastructure development business in the UK energy industry, has already gained planning permission for the project, which will work to help balance the national grid. Located at the Trafford Low Carbon Energy Park in Manchester, the 1GW project has been valued at £750 million and was given the green light after Trafford Council approved planning.

The plan is to get the battery project up and running by Q1 of 2025, and once the project is running, the Trafford facility will deliver ancillary and reserve services to the national grid and generate a series of commercial income streams. The project will be developed in a number of phases that allow different investors to buy into large-scale projects of 250MW at a later stage of development.

The location is placed strategically on the National Grid system for easy connection with the network. It is also ideally placed to feed into the high-pressure natural gas system and to the planned HyNet Hydrogen network. The Trafford Low Carbon Energy Park is already home to a number of low carbon technology projects, on a site that was formerly home to heavy industry.

The new battery site was acquired by Carlton Power in 2008 and the site's total investment value will be £2 billion. The company has already been given planning permission to build one of Britain's first pipelines for hydrogen power at the same site.

The site will also be home to another project to build the first liquid air storage infrastructure in the world on a commercial basis in a cryogenic energy system.