NatPower Marine wants UK ports treated as energy infrastructure. In a position set out this month, the company argues that shore power, electric ship charging and large scale battery storage should be planned as one system at the port, financed privately, and given priority access to the grid.
It comes in a month when the cost of shore power has moved to the centre of the UK debate. Portsmouth International Port has its new high voltage system but shipowners say plugging in costs more than running generators, and on 22 October the British Ports Association asked government for electricity cost relief for ports.
From shipping corridors to energy corridors
The company's reference case is the Irish Sea. With Peel Ports it is installing shore power at Heysham, a £10 million project covering all four berths, as the first stage of a £100 million programme of shore power and electric ship charging across Peel Ports locations in Great Britain and Ireland. Peel Ports estimates the full rollout could cut up to 166,800 tonnes of CO2 a year.
NatPower Marine points to the proposed Belfast to Heysham green shipping corridor as the kind of route where electrification works first: short sea services with fixed schedules and regular calls, so power can be planned around known vessel demand.
Storage as part of the system
The core of the argument is battery storage. The UK is curtailing growing volumes of offshore wind because the grid cannot always take the power when and where it is produced. Batteries at ports could store that surplus and release it for shore power, cold ironing, heavy vehicle charging and electric propulsion.
NatPower Marine estimates that shipping electrification alone would need around 7 GW and 56 GWh of storage in the UK, citing China's five year plan target for shipping electrification by 2030 and the UK's convergence with EU emissions rules. It uses California as the scale reference: nearly 17 GW of grid batteries installed by early 2026, supplying more than 12 GW on one evening in March.
On safety, the company says modern systems layer battery management, thermal control, automatic shutdown and isolation, fire detection and physical separation, and that many new projects use lithium iron phosphate cells, which are more thermally stable than nickel manganese cobalt chemistry. It says its own projects target biodiversity net gain above the statutory requirement.
What it wants from government
- Grid priority: ports recognised as strategic energy hubs when grid capacity is allocated, with separate allocation for marine electrification so it does not compete with sectors such as AI data centres
- Lower energy costs: reduced VAT and waived system costs on electricity supplied at ports
- Planning: faster decisions, modernised guidance for battery storage, and technical support for local authorities and emergency services
- Certainty: long term frameworks for shore power that let private capital move at scale
Why the pricing matters
The company first raised the issue in February, after the publicly funded shore power projects in Aberdeen and Portsmouth ran into trouble. When industrial electricity prices rose, ships found diesel cheaper than plugging in. NatPower Marine's view is that ports, acting as energy retailers, were left exposed to price volatility and to the risk of berths going unused, on assets that need 30 to 40 year investment horizons.
Its answer is a charge point operator model, where the infrastructure company funds, builds and runs the system instead of the port. It already applies this in Asia through Wah Kwong NatPower, its joint venture with the Wah Kwong group, and in July it agreed to acquire the Aqua superPower charging network for ports and marinas. The wider group targets 120 electrified port locations by 2030.
The UK now has two proposals on the table, one from its ports and one from private capital. Both point at the same number: the price of electricity at the berth.
