Highview Power

Highview Power was founded in 2005 in London, England by Peter Dearman and Toby Peters. Dearman, an engineer and inventor, had developed a concept for a reciprocating engine driven by liquid nitrogen that could power vehicles. Peters, a power systems researcher, co-founded Highview to test and develop the concept at the University of Leeds. In 2006, electrical engineer Gareth Brett joined Highview to lead fundraising and commercial development, and became CEO in 2009 — a role he held for a decade. The company's Airtable record shows a Founded Year of 2014, which reflects the year Highview was incorporated in its current form as an independent company pursuing commercial LAES deployment; the original 2005 founding date reflects the concept and early R&D phase. Highview is headquartered in London with offices in Australia, Dubai, and Chennai.

Highview was founded on the insight that liquid air — air cooled to -196°C where it becomes a liquid — could serve as an energy storage medium that is completely geographically flexible, non-toxic, fire-safe, and reliant entirely on existing industrial supply chains. The LAES (Liquid Air Energy Storage) process draws on established cryogenic technology from the industrial gas sector: excess electricity drives a liquefaction unit to cool air into a liquid, which is stored in simple insulated low-pressure tanks. When electricity is needed, the liquid air is exposed to ambient heat (or waste heat from nearby industrial processes), rapidly expanding 700-fold as it regasifies, driving a turbine to generate electricity. Unlike pumped hydro, LAES can be sited anywhere with grid access. Unlike lithium-ion, it scales cost-effectively beyond 8 hours of discharge duration.

Highview has raised over $400 million in total from investors including GIC (Singapore sovereign wealth fund), Goldman Sachs, UK Infrastructure Bank, Centrica, Rio Tinto, KIRKBI, and Mosaic Capital. Its key UK government funding includes a £8 million DECC grant for the world's first grid-scale LAES demonstrator. In 2024, Highview secured a £300 million investment round led by UK Infrastructure Bank and Centrica for its flagship Carrington project.

Highview's 5 MW / 15 MWh Pilsworth plant in Manchester, UK — the world's first grid-scale liquid air energy storage facility — has been commercially operating since 2018. In November 2025, Highview broke ground on its 300 MWh CRYOBattery facility in Carrington, Greater Manchester, which upon completion will be one of the world's largest long-duration energy storage installations. The technology is fully scalable from 10 MW to 500 MW+ and has been validated through over a decade of operating history.