Akela ABeam precast foundations at Emtec BESS: delivery and risk notes for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell

First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Akela Ground Engineering has delivered a full precast foundation system for eight BESS units and two PCS units at Emtec Energy’s Sandwich site in Kent, installing over 800 m of 200 × 200 mm driven precast piles to depths of up to 15 m in under five days and 220 m of ABeam ground beams in a further two days. The pinned-joint ABeam system removed the need for in situ concrete, pile caps, tie bars and follow-on trades, enabling a weather-independent, fully off-site manufactured solution delivered in under eight weeks. Use of Akela’s JX piling fleet cut working platform thickness and excavation volumes, reducing programme risk, site traffic and embodied carbon on a live, congested site with soft superficial deposits and biomass surcharge.
Technical Brief
- Foundation system designed to accommodate surcharge from stored biomass in addition to BESS/PCS loads.
- Variable ground profile included soft superficial deposits over granular bearing strata, driving the choice of driven piles.
- ABeam’s mechanical pinned joints allow rapid beam alignment and tolerance control without wet concrete adjustment.
- Precast beams manufactured at Akela’s Glasgow facility, decoupling production from the Kent site programme.
- JX piling fleet reduced working platform thickness, directly cutting imported fill and muck-away volumes.
- Reduced excavation and fewer vehicle movements were central to Emtec’s lower-carbon, low-traffic construction objectives.
- Live, congested site conditions required tightly sequenced piling and beam installation to avoid disrupting other trades.
- Early engagement between Emtec Utility Services and Akela enabled an off-site manufacture / on-site assembly strategy.
Our Take
Among recent UK Infrastructure items in our database, very few feature precast piling installed to depths of around 15 m on such short five‑day programmes, suggesting Akela Ground Engineering is positioning ABeam as a fast‑track option for time‑critical BESS sites.
Delivering more than 800 m of driven precast piling and over 200 m of ground beams from Akela’s precast facility near Glasgow into Kent underlines how offsite manufacture is starting to stretch typical regional catchments for UK foundation supply chains, which could influence how other BESS developers source civils packages.
Within the 740 Infrastructure stories and 2037 tag‑matched pieces on Projects and Sustainability, battery storage civil works like Emtec’s BESS project in Sandwich remain a small subset, indicating early movers in specialised foundation systems for BESS may gain a reputational edge as more grid‑scale schemes seek rapid deployment.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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