Owner-operator Eco Stor has secured a long-term toll with trader and VPP firm Next Kraftwerke for its 300MW/700MWh project in Förderstedt, Germany, one of the largest being built in the country.
Next Kraftwerke will trade the first phase of the 2.3-hour battery energy storage system (BESS) in the day-ahead, intraday and balancing energy markets from November 2026. It is being built in three phases of 100MW each, with the full thing coming online in 2027.
Eco Stor said the toll provides the economic basis for the long-term operation of the project and underscores the increasing maturity of the German market for large-scale battery storage.
Eco Stor started construction on the project in November last year, announced just a week after RWE did the same on a similarly sized project. Both are likely to be the joint-largest BESS projects in Germany when they come online. The largest currently is Eco Stor’s 103.5MW/238MWh Bollingstedt site.
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Energy storage in Germany is being driven by huge arbitrage opportunities in its deep wholesale energy market, as more and more solar enters the grid and legacy plants are phased out.
Like many large-scale BESS projects, Förderstedt is connecting to the grid with a flexible connection agreement (FCA). FCAs place limitations on the operation of BESS in order to help system operators manage the grid.
FCAs, tolls and all the other challenges and market drivers in Germany will be discussed at length in next week’s Energy Storage Summit at The Battery Show Europe, in Stuttgart, Germany.
Eco Stor’s managing director Georg Gallmetzer will be among dozens of expert speakers at the event, and gave a Q&A to Energy-Storage.news recently in which he said that offtake deals are absolute key for larger BESS projects.
On the other hand, Aquila Clean Energy EMEA’s deputy head of investment management Grace Kankindi said that banks are definitely willing to finance projects that have no offtake contracts, but she may well have been referring to projects smaller than Förderstedt.
The big timely news in Germany right now is that regulators have clarified that BESS projects coming online by 4 August 2029 will indeed be exempt from grid fees, after various statements threw this into question.
Next Kraftwerke, a virtual power plant (VPP) aggregator and trader, also recently provided a toll for a smaller BESS being built by Ju:niz Energy.
Eco Stor was acquired by clean energy platform X-Elio, part of investor Brookfield, and infrastructure investor NIC in 2024.
The Energy Storage Summit at The Battery Show Europe, in Stuttgart, Germany takes place next week (9-11 June). The conference is put on by our publisher Solar Media, part of Informa Connect, and you can get a 20% discount with our code ESN20.
See our Q&As with speakers from the event below:
