Battery owner Zenobe Energy has secured up to £20 million of funding to support a rollout of electric bus and charging infrastructure provided under service contracts to bus operators. The funding, from NatWest, is secured against the cashflows generated by Zenobe’s contracts with the operators to provide charging infrastructure and EV bus managed services.

Zenobe said the funding enables the company to offer end-to-end services to  bus operators including  design, installation, financing and operation of electrical charging infrastructure in the depot,  financing and optional replacement of the battery in the bus and the financing of the non-battery components of the bus.  Zenobē’s services work alongside the government’s Ultra-Low Emission Bus (ULEB) grant offering for transport operators as a match funder.

Meanwhile, Zenobē has 73MW of operational grid-scale battery capacity. The company uses bespoke software to optimise the monitoring, utilisation and dispatch of its batteries  It has developed software to enter the Fast Response and Reactive Power markets and recently won a contract with National Grid ESO to provide reactive power on the transmission network utilising battery technology – a world first.