Battery energy storage system (BESS) developer Giga Storage has closed financing on a 300MW/1,200MWh project in the Netherlands.
Giga Storage announced yesterday that with a €300 million (US$342.47 million) project finance secured, construction has begun on its Giga Leopard standalone BESS project in the city of Delfzijl, in Groningen, a province in the northeast of the European country.
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The developer attracted financing from eight undisclosed lenders for Giga Leopard, which is being built at the site of a former aluminium smelting plant. Commissioning is expected to take place in the latter half of 2027.
It’s a big step forward for Giga Storage, which develops projects in the Netherlands—its home country—and neighbouring Belgium and kicked off its first 12MW project with a crowdfunding campaign in 2020.
In 2022, then-CEO Ruud Nijs spoke with Energy-Storage.news about how the barriers to the business case for energy storage assets in the Netherlands were coming down.
In an interview shortly after Giga Storage closed financing for its 25MW/48MWh Giga Buffalo project, Nijs said that after the country committed to phasing out coal and saw its wind and solar adoption soar, the time was right for large-scale batteries to help fill in the gaps.
Since then, the scale of projects Giga Storage and its competitors in the Dutch market are working on has increased dramatically, both in megawatts of power output to the grid and megawatt-hours of duration.
The largest projects to have entered construction prior to Giga Leopard are Project Amethyst, a 45MW/90MWh system on which developer Dispatch closed financing last year from backers including Macquarie.
Utility Eneco said it would optimise a 31.6MW/126.4MWh project for a consortium of developers that is expected to go into operation by the end of this year, while currently the biggest operational standalone BESS in the country is thought to be SemperPower’s 30MW/68MWh Pollux project, which went online in 2023.
In September, LC Power received an ‘irrevocable’ permit for the development of a 500MW/2,000MWh project (Premium access), also in Groningen.
In other BESS news from the Netherlands this week, Rolls-Royce announced yesterday that it will supply a 35.1MW/144.4MWh system of its mtu large-scale storage solution to energy infrastructure investor Eleqtis in the municipality of Zeewold.
Rolls-Royce will supply and install the mtu system and will also maintain it over a 10-year long-term service agreement.
Giga Storage bought distribution grid from bankrupt smelter
However, while the business case is maturing, there are still challenges to storage development in the Netherlands. Chief among those is a highly congested grid, as is finding suitable land, as SemperPower commercial director Jacob Jan Stuyt told ESN Premium in an interview early in 2024.
In the case of Giga Leopard, Giga Storage appears to have got around the long wait times for grid connection by buying up the distribution grid in Groningen that served the DAMCO Aluminium Delfzijl Coöperatie UA smelters, which previously occupied the site.
Giga Storage bought the aluminium company’s grid from bankruptcy proceedings, enabling a connection to the high-voltage transmission network, in 2023 (Premium access).
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Belgium, development projects are even larger and have already crossed the multiple gigawatt-hour, with notable examples including Giga Storage’s Green Turtle battery park.
The developer hired engineering firm Sweco to design the 700MW/2,800MWh project last October, after permits were granted the previous April.
However, although Giga Leopard’s development timeline was a little behind Green Turtle’s, Giga Storage chief commercial officer (CCO) said in an ESN Premium interview in July last year that Giga Leopard’s construction will come first.
“The only reason the larger, 2,400MWh project in Belgium will come after that [Leopard] is that we don’t have the capacity to work on both engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) and technical engineering work concurrently,” CCO Lars Rupert said.
Rupert explained that Giga Storage—which was acquired by infrastructure investor InfraVia a couple of months prior to the July 2024 interview—bases its business model around owning and operating projects and contracting the storage services to multiple offtakers and optimisers.
InfraVia investment manager Vincent Menager said the developer’s majority owner is committed to helping Giga Storage develop a pipeline of more than 2GW of European utility-scale BESS assets, “such as the fully permitted GIGA Green Turtle in Dilsen-Stokkem, Belgium.”
“Strategically positioned at the connection between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, this 700MW/ 2,800MWh project should be the largest in Europe,” Menager said.
