Bowerhouse II Solar Farm and Burnley Battery Storage

Overview

As Senior Manager (Software) at Amberside Energy, I led the analytical and software workstreams supporting two major UK renewable energy projects: the Bowerhouse II Solar Farm and the Burnley Battery Storage Development, both delivered in partnership with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a major pension fund investor in clean energy infrastructure.

The UK Clean Power 2030 target created significant commercial pressure to rapidly identify, screen, and appraise viable sites at scale. My role sat at the intersection of data engineering, spatial analysis, and business development.

Bowerhouse II Solar Farm

Bowerhouse II is an operational solar farm. Our role was asset management and performance assurance, ensuring the site consistently delivered at the standard expected by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners as the investment partner.

Key contributions:

• Performance monitoring: Built and maintained the model that tracks live generation output against expected yield, flagging underperformance for engineering review.
• Data pipeline: Automated ingestion and processing of irradiance and generation data, ensuring the investment team always had clean, up-to-date performance reporting.
• Asset management support: Provided analytical backing for operational decisions, translating performance data into clear reporting for fund managers.

Burnley Battery Storage Development

The Burnley project is a 77 MW battery energy storage system (BESS) proposed for land east of Briercliffe, north of Halifax Road, centred on determining site viability before committing capital to planning and grid connection. The system is designed to store enough energy to power approximately 250,000 homes for two hours, connecting to the electricity grid via an overhead power line.

Amberside subsequently launched a public consultation in August 2024, seeking community feedback ahead of a planning submission to Burnley Council, as covered by the Burnley Express. Marc Scambler, CEO of Amberside Energy, described the project as critical to the UK’s low-carbon transition: “Battery energy storage systems are set to play a crucial role in the transition towards a low-carbon economy. Our plans at Briercliffe will make net zero targets more achievable, both at a local and national level.”

My analytical work underpinned the early-stage appraisal that made this project viable for progression to consultation:

• Grid capacity screening: Used cloud architecture and large-scale spatial datasets to identify substation capacity and circuit proximity, determining connection viability before significant capital was committed.
• Cloud data infrastructure: Designed and maintained the Azure-based data architecture, processing gigabytes of spatial and time-series data automatically, used across multiple projects in the Amberside portfolio.

Outcome

Both projects progressed through appraisal to investment committee review, with the analytical outputs directly informing go/no-go decisions. The Burnley BESS project advanced to public consultation in 2024, with a planning submission to Burnley Council to follow. The spatial screening and pipeline tooling developed across these projects was subsequently reused across the wider Amberside solar and battery development pipeline.