IPP Akuo will soon start building a 2.75-hour BESS project in Borba, Portugal, integrated into its 181MW Santas solar PV plant.
The SantasBAT battery energy storage system (BESS) project is scheduled for completion in Q2 2027.
The project secured €15 million (US$17.3 million) from Portugal’s portion of the EU-wide Recovery and Resilience scheme, which awarded some €100 million to 500MW of energy storage projects in spring 2025.
The government of Portugal is also prepping a new auction for large-scale energy storage following the Iberian peninsula blackout last year, as well as investments into modernising its grid.
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The SantasBAT project will shift solar production into periods of peak consumption. Portugal is aiming for 85% renewable energy in its production mix by 2030.
Large-scale projects in Portugal have been progressed to construction in the past 12 months by IPPs Sonnedix, Hyperion, Voltalia and NGEN.
The country has a handful of smaller projects online, commissioned over 2022-2025 and provided by system integrators including Fluence and Powin (which has since ceased trading), while these more recent projects show it moving into the next phase of scale.
Akuo meanwhile has occasionally done some level of in-house system integration for its BESS projects, though it didn’t say what its approach would be for the Portugal project.
The firm is a France-headquartered independent power producer (IPP) which has primarily focused its BESS activities to-date on various islands including Tonga, Martinique and New Caledonia (the latter two are French overseas territories).
