Two weeks after announcing its acquisition of Harmony Energy, Swiss power firm Alpiq has unveiled its first large-scale battery project in its home country.
The company, which agreed to buy a 90% stake in UK-based battery energy storage system (BESS) developer Harmony Energy earlier this month, said on Tuesday (21 July) that it is planning a 300MW/1,200MWh BESS project in Niedergösgen, a Swiss municipality about 50km west of Zurich.
In a post to the company’s corporate website, Alpiq board member and head of assets Amédée Murisier said the project would sit “at a key node in the Swiss transmission grid,” with both a nuclear plant and a run-of-river hydroelectric plant nearby.
Murisier said a framework agreement covering the grid connection has been signed with transmission system operator (TSO) Swissgrid, and the permitting approvals process will begin soon.
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Alpiq is a power generation, trading and project origination business headquartered in Lausanne, with a portfolio across Europe that includes pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), nuclear, hydroelectric, gas and renewable energy.
The company inaugurated its first fully-owned battery energy storage system (BESS) project in October 2025, a 30MW/36MWh asset in Finland acquired from Merus Power. It was also the first BESS in the Nordics to meet grid-forming (GFM) requirements, according to Alpiq.
This first project’s acquisition was followed by Alpiq’s purchase of two projects of 100MW/200MWh each in France, acquired from the company’s eventual acquisition target Harmony Energy. Within Switzerland, it has experience in trading and optimising batteries, serving as one of two route-to-market (RTM) providers for a 28MW system brought online in 2024 by utility EWS AG and developer MW Storage.
The Alpiq project looks set to become Switzerland’s largest standalone lithium-ion (Li-ion) BESS so far, although the company did not give timelines for its planned construction and commissioning.
What is thought to be the largest announced in the landlocked country to date is a 50-60MW/100MW-120MWh project acquired by infrastructure investor Avadis Investment Foundation in late 2024. At the time of its acquisition, Avadis said construction would begin this year, with COD in 2027.
The majority of Switzerland’s energy storage capacity comes from pumped hydro, with a nationwide fleet of around 3.5GW. This includes the Nant de Drance 900MW/20,000MWh PHES plant. Nant de Drance came online in 2022. Alpiq is the asset’s biggest shareholder with a 39% stake.
However, a large-scale non-lithium project in Switzerland has also been making recent headlines. Developer Flexbase is developing a data centre project in Laufenberg, which is planned to feature a 2.1GWh vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) energy storage system. That would make it the world’s biggest flow battery project to date.
Anglo-American flow battery provider Invinity Energy Systems has been selected by Flexbase as its strategic partner on the project after a competitive solicitation. Invinity will design the VRFB system and company president Matt Harper told ESN Premium in June that the project will be significant both in terms of its sheer scale and its application of long-duration energy storage (LDES) flow batteries to meet data centre use cases.
