Much has been said about the rise and rise of Rolls-Royce (LSE: RR) stock in recent years. The staggering returns – up over 15 times since 2022 – have come on the back of earnings beat after earnings beat from brilliant performance across the company.
The jewels in the crown are perhaps Civil Aerospace (manufacturing and servicing engines for passenger planes) and Defence (providing engines and other power systems for military vehicles).
But what gets less spoken of is the firm’s green energy credentials. The possibility of SMRs (small nuclear power stations) becoming viable for widespread electricity generation is one feather in the cap here. But a recent announcement has underlined that nuclear might not be the only string to the Rolls-Royce clean energy bow…
Flagships
So what happened? Rolls-Royce has started building an energy storage facility in Scotland. These facilities are designed to hold the electricity generated from wind or solar power to be used when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. This kind of energy storage is sorely lacking at the moment. Bizarrely, colossal sums of money are spent turning off wind power generation – as much as £1.5bn in 2025!
The electricity infrastructure overhaul the UK is currently going through needs many of these sites. And in fairness, many have been built by other companies and organisations. But this is the first by Rolls-Royce, and it is hoped it will be a flagship of sorts to be followed by many more.
Perhaps most pleasingly, the device will be online later this year and fully operational by 2027. The quick startup combined with a proposed 15 years of maintenance both sound good to me. And it’s nice to hear that Rolls-Royce is making use of Scottish supply chains too!
Grand scheme
Is the news a total game-changer? Not really. It’s easy to forget what a massive company Rolls-Royce is these days – over £100bn in market cap and the fifth biggest on the FTSE 100! These kind of announcements simply don’t move the needle like they might have a few years ago when it was a £5bn company.
Likewise, the facility itself is not large in the grand scheme of things. The capacity is 86MWh – enough for 10,000 homes. The UK as a whole has 13,000MWh and the current project pipeline should see that to grow to 127,000MWh. This one site is a drop in the ocean.
The way I’m looking at it? This is more good news coming out of a company that has made a habit of releasing good news. And there’s a possibility that the production of these sites becomes a serious income stream in the years to come. I think the stock is worth considering.
