A trio of notable Germany announcements: Aquila Clean Energy EMEA has financed a merchant project, Chint Solar has sold a portfolio to Second Foundation while Twaice will provide analytics on behalf of BayWa r.e..
The news comes as the Energy Storage Summit at the Battery Show Europe takes place this week in Stuttgart (9-11 June), Germany, hosted by Energy-Storage.news publisher Solar Media and co-located with parent company Informa’s The Battery Show Europe.
Aquila claims ‘first fully merchant BESS financing’ in Germany
IPP Aquila Clean Energy EMEA has completed financial close on its Project Wetzen, a 56MW/112MWh standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) in Lower Saxony, Germany.
The financing was provided by INC Deutschland with a debt volume of over €26 million (US$30 million).
Aquila claimed it is one of the first fully merchant BESS financings of its kind in the German market. The implication is that other projects in Germany have needed some level of contracted, guaranteed revenues to get external project financing, or have had to be financed by companies’ own balance sheets.
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Optimiser Entrix will trade the BESS in the market, as well as another similarly sized one, both the first projects in a 14-project portfolio Aquila aims to deploy in Germany.
It was just two weeks ago that Grace Kankindi, deputy head of investment management for Aquila, told us that lenders in Germany are increasingly willing to back large-scale BESS projects in Germany that don’t have any contracted revenues.
Kankindi was giving us a Q&A ahead of the Energy Storage Summit at the Battery Show Europe event, at which she is a speaker.
Yesterday we published panel write-ups on the topics of market ‘hype’, policy and regulatory uncertainty and opportunities in the upcoming capacity market, and will bring you more today and tomorrow.
Chint Solar sells 180MWh portfolio to Second Foundation
Developer and ECP Chint Solar Europe has sold five BESS projects in Germany, totalling 56MW/180MWh, to Czechia-based energy trading firm Second Foundation.
As part of the deal, Chint will also build and maintain the projects under an EPC and operations & maintenance (O&M) contract. The projects are spread across Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Brandenburg and will come online between Q2 2026 and Q3 2027.
Second Foundation is primarily an energy trading firm, and one of the largest in Germany, but is now moving into owning and operating BESS projects. It is set to commission 307MW in Czechia this year. Last year, it scored a BESS optimisation deal from Winda Energy in Finland.
Twaice partners with Baywa r.e. for analytics on project
Battery analytics company Twaice will provide its services for a 137.5MW/282MWh BESS, Alfeld, that developer and renewables services firm Baywa r.e. recently announced an O&M contract for.
Baywa is providing the suite of O&M services to project owner Scale Fund, which bought the project from developer Kyon Energy.
Twaice will provide a vendor-agnostic view of BESS performance, helping to identify underperformance earlier, prioritise the right actions, and bring transparency into daily operations, it said.
While much larger projects are under construction in Germany, Alfeld will be the largest in the country when it comes online in Q3 this year.
