Executive Summary

• Amwins Global Risks has announced it has expanded its specialist commercial and industrial insurance facility to include BESS and EV charging infrastructure
• The move enables the insurer to bring smaller assets together to underwrite them efficiently at portfolio scale while recognising risk characteristics of individual sites
• The move is another sign of how the changing energy landscape is affecting insurance after Allianz had in July committed more specialist support to customers with renewable energy projects

The landscape for battery energy storage systems (BESS) is evolving – and so must the insurance industry with it.

Last week, Amwins Global Risks (AGR) announced it had expanded its specialist commercial and industrial (C&I) insurance facility to include BESS and EV charging infrastructure. The company, which offers such cover through NARDAC, a specialist energy and infrastructure broker it acquired earlier this year, noted that while these assets may be relatively small and geographically dispersed, they can in concert represent an increasingly substantial portfolio for developers, owners, and investors.

The theory holds that, if smaller projects are insured using structures designed for larger utility-scale assets, the numbers may not add up. This can therefore be seen as more of a restructuring than a brand new approach.

“Bringing those assets together allows us to underwrite them efficiently at portfolio scale, while still recognising the individual risk characteristics of each site,” said Dr. Tom Harries, director at Amwins Global Risks.

Amwins already has its toe in the water in this space, with regard to an existing facility which provides portfolio-based insurance for distributed commercial and community-scale solar assets.

“The addition of BESS and EV charging infrastructure reflects the increasing convergence of distributed energy technologies,” added Harries. “It allows us to focus on monitoring how the portfolio’s natural catastrophe exposure changes as new projects are added and gives developers the freedom to concentrate on building out their portfolios, knowing their insurance programme can adapt and grow alongside them.”

So, how and why is this important? Battery storage and solar PV are becoming key parts of the UK’s low-carbon future, yet an insurance gap is appearing. As Browne Jacobson put it in August, ageing solar installations and lithium-ion battery fires are among the fire risks ‘quietly reshaping the UK property insurance market’, with each ‘moving faster than the industry’s response to it.’

Miller & Partner, in a comprehensive guide to BESS fire and BI cover, put it succinctly. Two fires in 2025 – one in the UK, one in the US – ‘fundamentally reset’ the insurance market underwriting the expansion in battery storage projects. Rates have hardened and terms have tightened, as differentiation grows between mature operators and those at early operation stage. “Generic commercial combined policies cannot respond to this risk profile,” the company noted. “Specialist placement is now the only realistic route to comprehensive cover.”

In July, Allianz UK said it was giving its brokers specialist support for customers with renewable energy projects by expanding its underwriting capability for BESS. The company said BESS was a ‘developing area of risk’, making conversations with experienced underwriters and renewable energy specialists ‘so valuable.’

Last month, Amwins published its State of the Market Report: A Focus on the 2026 Energy Marketplace. The report noted how expanding solar, BESS, data centres and emerging nuclear technologies were creating complex exposures involving equipment reliability and catastrophe risk.

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